California Post Reporter Hounded by Anti-Cop Protesters at LAPD Meeting
California Post reporter Jamie Paige said she was hounded by “radical leftist agitators” who screamed insults at her and tried to block her from taking pictures at a Los Angeles Police Department meeting on Tuesday.
Paige reported that “around 40 agitators — many of them obscuring their identity with medical masks or keffiyeh scarves” went to the meeting to chant “F*ck the police” and call the cops “pigs” before they “viciously” turned and directed their ire at her.
Here is how Paige described their “deranged fury”:
They got in our space, blocking our cameras, and covered our lenses, physically boxing me in to stop filming. Others screamed insults at us and discredited what we doing; which was reporting the fact.
One laughably told me they were there to “protect journalists.”
Footage from the meeting captured protesters flipping the middle finger at cameras and putting their hands up in Paige’s face to interrupt her reporting.
“You are afraid of me, aren’t you?” protester Jason Reedy seethed at Paige, according to her story.
Paige wrote that her and the Post‘s photographer left the meeting after it was shut down by the protesters; she said they did not leave because they were “intimidated into silence, but because the situation had become unsafe and our job was to report.”
The chaotic scene came just a day after the California Post launched as the West Coast sibling of the New York Post.
Soon after, Post released an editorial titled “We will not be intimidated,” in which it said it sent Paige to cover the meeting and she ended up getting “attacked by a mob”:
Protesters had arrived and tried to intimidate the chief of the LAPD, rather than to air their grievances in an ordinary fashion.
They drowned out their fellow residents. And they turned on our reporter, who was just doing her job.
They shouted at her; they shoved their hands in her face; they blocked her camera; and they eventually forced her to leave the meeting for her own safety. That is completely outrageous.
The editorial board added this was not a complete shock because Californians have to live in a “political climate of fear, right out of the Soviet Union.”
You can read that full response and see pictures from the wild event by clicking here. And you can watch a two minute video from the meeting above.
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