SAG-AFTRA Offers Fiery Response To Radio Press Arrest

By
Adam Jacobson
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LOS ANGELES — Nearly two weeks after Los Angeles Sheriff’s deputies fatally shot an African American man, Dijon Kizzee, protesters convened on Saturday yards from the South L.A. locale where he was killed.


Covering the event was a credentialed journalist for Southern California’s spoken word NPR member station, KPCC-FM 89.3 in Pasadena, Calif. Somehow, the journalist, Josie Huang, got caught up in the police response to what the Sheriff’s Office called the work of outside “anarchists.”

Huang is now speaking out about her experience. SAG-AFTRA shared its ire in its own statement on the matter, shedding new concern on the growing safety concerns of field journalists from serving both local radio and television.

Huang’s chronicle of the events of Sept. 12 can be seen on her Twitter feed. Deputies in riot gear cordoned several blocks of Imperial Highway. Among the Black protesters were “non-Black protesters coming from outside South L.A. to demonstrate” — something welcomed, at first.

Then, following peaceful protests calling for murder charges against the deputies, things turned ugly. Two Sheriff’s deputies were allegedly ambushed and shot in Compton, and transported to St. Francis Medical Center with multiple gunshot wounds.

As the situation worsened, Huang was shooting video footage in nearby Lynwood, Calif., for KPCC and its LAist online lifestyle magazine. With local news doing their 11pm newscast “hits,” Sheriff’s officers approached Huang.

 

Additional Twitter footage shows one of the officers stomping on her smartphone while video recording continued.

 

Huang was arrested, charged with obstructing a peace officer by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office and taken to jail; she was released shortly thereafter. The experience of being transported in the patrol car was troubling in and of itself.

“I was put in the back of a patrol car — the start of some 5 hours in LASD custody that began with the deputy refusing to uncuff me so I could put my face covering back on, telling me I just had a ‘scrape’ when I was bleeding from my foot and not giving me back a shoe,” Huang tweeted midday Sunday.

Her smartphone survived the ordeal; Leanne Suter, a reporter for KABC-7 in Los Angeles, filmed what happened to Huang and obtained her phone.

Huang’s ordeal has resulted in renewed furor over the treatment of working journalists in tense situations such as these.

At KPCC, its journalists issued a joint statement on Saturday’s events.

“We offer condolences to the two sheriff deputies who were shot Saturday evening,” it reads. “These are challenging and stressful times for everyone, but Josie was arrested while doing her job. The charges should be dropped. Her arrest is the latest in a series of troubling interactions between our reporters and some local law enforcement officers. Journalists provide an essential service, providing fair, accurate and timely journalism and without them, our democracy is at risk.”

The incident involving Huang also led SAG-AFTRA to speak out against the L.A. Sheriff’s Department.

“Huang was visibly credentialed as a working journalist and verbally identified herself as a member of the press,” the union said in a statement released Monday. “She had done nothing to warrant questioning much less arrest. This is another deeply troubling interaction in a string of police arrests and often violent attacks on working journalists who are abiding by the law and simply trying to do their jobs.”

SAG-AFTRA is calling on the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to drop all charges and apologize to Huang.

— Editing and additional reporting by Adam Jacobson in Boca Raton, Fla.

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