When San Francisco police arrived at journalist Bryan Carmody’s apartment last week, they smashed the building’s gate with a sledgehammer, placed him in handcuffs, and raided his home with guns drawn.
They left with his notebooks, computers, phones, and various other electronic devices, as well as a police report on the death of Jeff Adachi, the city’s public defender.
“I knew what they wanted,” said Carmody in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “They wanted the name.”
That is, they wanted the name of the person who leaked the police report to Carmody, who then sold it to three local news outlets. His company, North Bay News, tracks stories overnight and sells the resulting footage and information to television stations for their round-the-clock coverage.
Agents had attempted to identify his source several weeks prior; Carmody says he “politely” declined to provide it. The department then sought warrants for the raid, raising serious First Amendment concerns around Carmody’s protections as a journalist.