By Stephanie Sugars / CPJ North America Program Intern
On September 17 last year, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Mike Faulk was covering protests over the acquittal of a former police officer in the killing a year earlier of man named Anthony Lamar Smith.
At about 11 p.m., officers formed a line across Washington Avenue near Tucker Boulevard in downtown St. Louis, and officers in full riot gear blocked the other three streets. Hearing the order for protesters to “Move back,” Faulk found that he had nowhere to go, according to an account by his lawyer.
Faulk was arrested alongside approximately 100 protesters, bystanders, and other journalists—all caught in a police tactic known as kettling.
The method involves police encircling a group to prevent any exit before advancing, and it is often followed with indiscriminate detentions and arrests. Of the 34 journalist arrests documented by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker last year, CPJ found that 22 were detained in kettles.
Journalists caught in kettles can face lengthy periods of legal uncertainty, high legal costs, and job insecurity, particularly if equipment is seized. Unlike staff journalists who are often released after police verify their credentials, freelancers can be vulnerable because they lack the backing of a large outlet to help secure their release or pay legal costs.
Post-Dispatch reporter Robert Patrick, who said he narrowly avoided the September kettle in St. Louis, told CPJ it was absurd that he could have been arrested like his colleague just for doing his job.
“I wasn’t protesting: I was watching what the police were doing, what the protesters were doing,” Patrick said. “I was on the sidewalk, I wasn’t—to my mind—doing anything that was illegal.”
In 2004, the Council of the District of Columbia passed the First Amendment Rights and Police Standards Act to regulate and direct police actions that might chill free speech, including a directive to not kettle protesters. The only exception is if police have probable cause to believe that many participants committed unlawful acts and that officers are able to identify, and plan to arrest, those individuals. For nearly 15 years the use of kettling in D.C. halted.
Cities in other countries have banned the practice. After criticism over the use of kettling in protests around the G20 in 2010, police in Toronto, Canada, released a statement saying the tactic would not be used again.
Police in the U.S. however have used the tactic at several protests across the country in the past 18 months, including the inauguration protest in Washington, D.C., an environmental protest at Standing Rock, North Dakota, and an anti-hate protest in Portland, Oregon.
King Downing, director of mass defense at the National Lawyers Guild, told CPJ he was shocked when police used the tactic in St. Louis and Washington, D.C.
He said that activists and lawyers whom he met in Missouri during a trip to follow up about the September kettle with local guild members, were as taken aback as he was. “Our feeling is that [kettling] somehow has moved or grown and we wonder the source,” he said.