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EDITORIAL
Illegal detentions are not 'reasonable'
(Published August 9, 2004)

U.S. Capitol Police are attempting to minimize their illegal detention of two journalists working for The Common Denominator. This distortion of the truth by police officers – paid with tax dollars to protect the public, including journalists – is reprehensible.

Editor and Publisher Kathryn Sinzinger and reporter Michael Hoffman, both stopped in separate locations on Capitol Hill Aug. 6 after they snapped pictures of roadblocks on public streets, identified themselves as working journalists to the officers who stopped them.

Yet Sinzinger was detained for 15 minutes on the Senate side of Capitol Hill and Hoffman was detained for about an hour on the House side. Neither was given back their identification cards – despite repeated requests, even as police told the journalists they were "free to go" – until officers from the U.S. Capitol Police Investigations Division Task Force drove to the scene and talked with them. The Capitol police claim that neither reporter was detained.

Sinzinger, a veteran journalist, protested to officers that she had a constitutional right to do exactly what she was doing when she was stopped. Officers did not ask Sinzinger to give up her rights, and she did not voluntarily do so.

For Hoffman, a summer reporting intern who recently completed his sophomore year at American University, the experience that police have characterized publicly as a mere "contact" or "interview" became a frightening ordeal.

When stopped, Hoffman told police officers that he was working on a news assignment for The Common Denominator and repeatedly, while being detained, told officers how they could contact his newspaper and his editor to confirm his assignment. Yet, police never attempted to contact The Common Denominator to confirm Hoffman's status as a working journalist.

Instead, officers asked Hoffman to empty his pockets, took his reporter's notebook and camera, and interrogated him extensively – at times, heatedly – about his reporting assignment as alleged "suspicious activities." His Social Security number was run through a police check. Police would not return Hoffman's D.C. driver's license until they were done questioning him.

Hoffman says a police officer told him he had "done nothing that was illegal." Yet, his detention and questioning continued.

Unbeknownst at the time to Sinzinger and Hoffman, both journalists apparently were being detained and questioned by police at the same moment. Sinzinger was stopped at 4:20 p.m. and was not given back her D.C. driver's license and press card until 4:35 p.m. – after being told that she "checked out." Hoffman was stopped at about 4:30 p.m. Police have not explained why Sinzinger was not asked if Hoffman was, indeed, one of her staff reporters working on assignment. Hoffman's detention, we can only hope, would have ended at that point.

Hoffman's disposable camera, property of The Common Denominator, was not returned. During Sinzinger's telephone inquiry about the camera to the U.S. Capitol Police Investigations Task Force, a lieutenant told Sinzinger that police normally develop photographs from seized cameras, make two sets of prints and keep one. Sinzinger demanded return of the newspaper's illegally seized camera and was told – on a return phone call – that she and Hoffman could pick up the camera. Upon prompt arrival to do so, police officers turned over a MotoPhoto envelope containing negatives and one set of prints from the disposable camera, now destroyed in the film developing process. Sinzinger's request that police also turn over the second set of Hoffman's photographs was denied.

A U.S. Capitol Police officer delivered a second set of prints from Hoffman's camera to The Common Denominator's Northeast Washington offices shortly after 1 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 7. "I don't think we should have kept them," Assistant Chief James P. Rohan told Sinzinger during a noon telephone conversation that day. Rohan made the call to The Common Denominator after Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District's delegate to Congress, scheduled a Capitol Hill press conference that afternoon to call for stricter police rules to prevent illegal detentions of citizens and journalists.

"We didn't do the absolute best job about this that we should have. …If you felt you were treated inappropriately, I apologize for that on behalf of the department," Rohan told Sinzinger during the Saturday phone conversation.

U.S. Capitol Police maintain that their treatment of Sinzinger and Hoffman, who were stopped after photographing roadblocks on public streets that have been seen by millions of people on television and by countless tourists, was "reasonable."

We respectfully disagree – and object loudly.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator