Margaret Smith

            For five journalism students, their first time personally working with a Chicago police officer certainly wasn’t a good one.

            Five Columbia College Chicago journalism majors who tried to record a Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy beat meeting Wednesday ran into trouble after police officers refused to let them tape record, and ordered them to turn their devices off.

The students were covering a CAPS meeting at beat 1834 for one of their classes, said Thomas Pardee, one of the students present.  According to the Columbia sophomore, him and his classmates arrived early to the meeting.  Only two members of the public were there, and four or five police officers were sitting behind a table at the front of the room.  The students sat down in the back, and about three or four of them pulled out their tape recorders and recorded the entire meeting.  Nothing happened during the meeting; it was afterwards, when they broke up to conduct individual interviews, that the trouble began.

            Pardee said he was recording an interview when one of the officers, Sergeant Banaszkiewicz, came up to him and told him he wasn’t allowed to record at a CAPS meeting.

            “He said that I should know for the future that I wasn’t allowed to tape record those meetings, and if I did it again we would be kicked out,” Pardee said.  “He was really rude, and that’s putting it mildly.”

             Srgt. Banaszkiwicz then told all of the students to turn off their tape recorders, and ordered them to spread the word to their classes.

            “I was just very angered at the fact that this officer thought it was his job to educate us and that he did it so viciously,” Pardee said. “What I’ve found is that a lot of them think they know the rules.  They think they know your job better than you do.” 

            According to Monique Bond, Director of News Affairs for the Chicago Police Department, the media is not encouraged to tape record meetings for the benefit of the public.  Citizens may feel uncomfortable talking about crime if members of the media are taking down their every word, and in CAPS meetings, citizens should be able to talk as freely as possible.

            “We don’t want them to feel like they’re being monitored, watched, or taped,” Bond said.  “It makes them hesitant to come forward with information.  This is the one time where we have an opportunity to hear community concerns.”

            However, police protocol does dictate that citizens can vote to decide if they want their meetings to be recorded by the media or not.  Sometimes citizens may want to share their information with reporters, Bond said.

            “When there are large meetings, usually they want the media there, but we just have to give the option to the community first,” Bond said.  “We have the right to reserve the privacy of the citizens.”

            Pardee has never heard any of these rules, though.

Either has Heather Kimmons, assistant public access counselor for Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

According to Kimmons, journalists should be allowed to record during CAPS meetings.

Under the Illinois Open Meetings Act, section 2.05, any person can record an open meeting using tape, film, or any other meetings.  Authorities can set rules to ensure that meetings aren’t interfered with, but they cannot ban recording devices all together. 

            “[All rules and rights] would turn upon whether this was a meeting of the public body,” Kimmons said.  “In all likelihood, this would qualify as an open meeting, in which case any person is allowed to record.”

            The rules still seem to be a bit unclear between police officers and the media.  For Thomas Pardee, however, it’s obvious what he got out of this experience.

            “Police are representatives for the Police Department, and this officer was a terrible representative,” he said.  “Chicago police officers don’t have the best reputation as it is, and it seems to me that it should be part of their job to prove that wrong.  That’s the opposite of what he did that day.”

 

 

WC: 673

 

Source List

 

CAPS Meeting – Beat 1834

In-person on 2/27/08

 

Thomas Pardee, Journalism Student at Columbia College Chicago

(209) 681-4368

Interviewed over the phone on 3/11/08

 

Heather Kimmons, Assistant Public Access Counselor for Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan

(217) 557-0548

Interviewed over the phone by Margaret on 3/11/08

 

Monique Bond, Director of News Affairs for the Chicago Police Department

(312) 745-6110

Monique.bond@chicagopolice.org

Interviewed over the phone by Thomas on 3/11/08