A reporter who covered the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in 2020 is dying from her police-inflicted injuries.
Linda Tirado (photo, left), then a 38-year-old photojournalist, drove from Tennessee “to cover the unrest” in Minneapolis after a rogue cop murdered George Floyd, an NPR story says (here).
Despite her press badge, a cop shot her in the face with a plastic slug. She lost an eye, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and now she’s dying in hospice care.
After being injured, Tirado sued the city and police. She expected her lifetime medical expenses from the incident to reach $2.5 million, but settled with the city for only $600,000, and her family has struggled to cover her medical bills and costs of care. She will leave behind a husband and two children.
Earlier this year, Minneapolis agreed to pay $950,000 to other journalists an ACLU lawsuit alleged the police purposely injured or arrested despite their press credentials (see that story here).
Police misconduct is, unfortunately, pretty common. There’s plenty of evidence America has a surfeit of violent and rogue cops. They’re racking up big liabilities for taxpayers and insurance companies.
America has a policing crisis. Recruiting, selection, training, supervision, and discipline are falling short. Often bad cops forced out of one policy agency simply go to another. That’s what happened in the case of Tamir Rice’s killer.
“Support the police” is a popular mantra, but politicians also need to support citizens’ constitutional rights (but don’t expect that from Trump, who dislikes protesters, and may dislike journalists even more). Saying Tirado should have avoided the scene of the protests is the wrong answer, because it’s the press that holds government accountable when its institutions fail to do so.
That’s largely been the case with respect to police brutality and racist policing. Covering anti-police protests is a legitimate journalistic enterprise, and police retaliation against the journalists is intolerable in a free society. Journalists, like police, go in harm’s way to cover protests and riots; but they shouldn’t be in harm’s way from police. Tirado is a hero who gave her life to press freedom, and to our freedom.
Photo below: Minneapolis police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters, and also the photographer who took the picture, on May 29, 2020, the day journalist Linda Tirado was injured (and, ultimately, killed) by cops.
