Commentary: Journalist? California law enforcement puts a target on your head - The People’s Vanguard of Davis
By Rory Fleming
Jeremy Portje, a young Black photojournalist, was attempting to film footage at a homeless encampment when Sausalito police officers confronted him. They ended up throwing him to the ground and arresting him, while bystanders filmed them. Portje appears to submit throughout a seven-minute video posted to YouTube.
The cops, who are white, claimed Portje hit an officer in the face with his camera. They kept his equipment. Later, when asking Judge Mark Talamantes for a search warrant, they claimed he is “known to be actively anti-police” and “not a true objective journalist.”
Both the police department and the elected District Attorney, Lori Frugoli, claimed his equipment was not searched, but they lied. A memo sent from investigator Brett Liddicoet to DA Frugoli proved it. After local news put this on blast, the DA dropped the case.
As a threshold matter, if Portje is some insurgent radical, he is the most subtle one I’ve ever seen. He photographs dudes who love birds. He hangs out with veterans. He trains dogs to save people in crisis.
As another one, Frugoli is one of those very special DAs who went to law school not to be a lawyer, but to be a prosecutor. In high school, she was a police cadet. Then she became an officer with the Santa Rosa Police Department. A night student, she put herself through law school by working at the Marin County Sheriff’s Office.
Her first law job? Deputy prosecutor in the Marin County DA’s Office.
Any claim that she has a prosecutor’s necessary level of separation between herself and local police agencies must be viewed through this lens. This case should have been honestly investigated by the DA; an honest investigation would have meant no reason to charge Portje with a crime in the first place.
But the fact that a candidate like Frugoli could win the 2018 DA race over a progressive, Anna Pletcher, in one of most liberal counties in the nation, says something about a significant swath of California Democrats. They support abortion, they support LGBTQ+ rights, and they’re almost as conservative on criminal justice as Texans.
It is also rather convenient that Marin County is less than 3 percent Black, and Black people are most disproportionately hammered by the criminal justice system.
On top of that, a recent study from UC Berkeley found that the county is highly segregated by race. Stephen Menendian, the lead researcher on the study, said of the Bay Area, “Marin is substantially the most segregated county in the nine-county area. You have a sea of white. There is basically nothing that is integrated in the entire county.”
Most white Marin County liberals probably don’t know — really know — a Black person. They know about the concerns and desires of Black people from social media and movies.
That makes it easier to accept discrimination against people like Portje. In fact, local reporting essentially censored his racial identity. I had to comb through his social media and video footage of the incident to find out.
As for a solution, I think back to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign slogan, “fight for that person you don’t even know.” Maybe some people care how many Black friends a person has, like it’s a contest. I don’t.
What I do care about is that what happened to Portje is wrong, and that there is little chance locals will take stock of what really happened here.
To be able to call oneself a liberal, a basic litmus test should be whether you are willing to fight for someone you don’t know. If you aren’t, then what will distinguish you once the abortion and LGBTQ+ rights fights are finally settled?
Rory is a writer and licensed attorney.
source: https://www.davisvanguard.org/2022/01/commentary-journalist-california-law-enforcement-puts-a-target-on-your-head/
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