LOS ANGELES – Los Angeles Times reporter James Queally was briefly detained by the Los Angeles Police Department as he was covering a protest in Echo Park on Thursday evening, according to video of his detention posted on social media.
Queally was reporting on the protest for The Times when he was detained. Protesters were also detained by police, who had issued a dispersal order for the area.
After inquiries by Times editors and its attorney, Queally was released. It was not immediately clear why he was detained, but police had issued a statement a short time earlier saying reporters were subject to dispersal orders in the area.
Times Managing Editor Kimi Yoshino said the paper was outraged that Queally was detained simply for doing his job. The Times immediately protested to authorities and he was released without charges.
Capt. Stacy Spell, an LAPD spokesman, said he was sending a communications supervisor to the scene to speak with commanders there.
Before Queally's release, Spell had said that if Queally — an award-winning courts reporter for The Times — hadn't done "anything out of character" during the protest, then he would likely get "a dust-off" and be released.
"I wouldn't expect James would do anything out of character, but we have to make sure that that wasn't the case," Spell said.
Matt Pearce, president of The Times' employees' union, had demanded Queally's immediate release.
"Journalism is not a crime, @LAPDHQ," Pearce said in a statement. "Stop making excuses for arresting our journalists. You know who they are, and you know they're there on behalf of the public."
Queally helped write a recent story about the LAPD charging another L.A. reporter, Lexis-Olivier Ray of L.A. Taco, with failure to disperse from a protest scene. On Thursday, Ray tweeted video of Queally being arrested, alerting other Times reporters and editors.
