Hey everyone,
Watch this video. It’s a single moment from the police bodycam footage of the raids on the Marion County Record office in 2023. It makes my skin crawl because you get to see an otherwise abstract fear come into full, human manifestation — in the form of a brusque cop bending irritably over a desk.
Here’s what you’re watching and hearing:
A cop is standing in the Record newsroom. He’s next to a gray cubicle. He calls over to the chief of police, Gideon Cody.
COP: You wanna look through this desk?
Chief Cody says back to him:
CODY: You have a right to look.
It’s clear from his tone that the cop is trying to tell Cody something, and Cody’s not getting it. The cop says:
COP: I know. I’m asking: do YOU want to look through this desk?
Cody says again:
CODY: I’m saying you have a right to.
But Cody comes over anyway. Behind the cop’s clipboard, you can see the police chief bending over the cubicle desk, peering at something. The subordinate officer says to him:
COP: You will understand shortly.
Then 20 seconds or so go by. With Cody just…looking.
What was in that desk?
A folder. Labeled: Captain Gideon Cody.
It belonged to the Record reporter who was investigating him. It contained her notes. Her reporting leads. And names of confidential sources from Cody’s old department — people who accused him of bullying, harassment, abuse of power.
This is what Cody appears to be looking at. Because after a long pause, he says:
CODY: Keep a personal file on me, I don’t care.
Then he moves on. Presumably with the names of his accusers in his head.
What’s so enraging and chilling about this moment — a police chief using a search warrant to view a reporter’s notes about him — is that there’s a federal law that Congress passed to specifically prohibit this very behavior.
It started in 1971, at Stanford, when the university fired a Black janitor and denied tenure to a Latino professor. Protests erupted and led to violence with the police. The Palo Alto cops knew that the student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, had photographers on the scene. So they raided the Daily newsroom late one night, tearing through file cabinets and paperwork, searching for film with unpublished photographs to help them identify protesters.
The student journalists were stunned. They sued, claiming this was a First Amendment violation. Initially, they won, but then the police appealed, it went to the Supreme Court, and the majority of justices found in favor of the cops — saying there was no distinction between getting a warrant for a newsroom or any other location.
And here’s one of those times when you realize how different the ‘70s were from today: By the time SCOTUS decided this case, bipartisan opposition to this kind of conduct by the police was already brewing. Strom Thurmond, of all people, was one of the lawmakers who proposed legislation to stop it. Jimmy Carter urged Congress to act, to make newsroom searches illegal.
In 1980, Congress passed the Privacy Protection Act, which made it illegal, in most situations, for government officials to seize journalists’ materials. If law enforcement needs or wants info from a news outlet or reporter, they have to ask or subpoena for it. They can’t do an unannounced raid.
And yet here in this video the Marion Police were, more than 40 years after the Act’s passing, hunting, unfettered, through the office of their local newspaper.
I want to share here one of the stories the Marion County Record ultimately ran about their investigation into Chief Cody.
This article, by Record reporter Deb Gruver, is based on conversations with seven former colleagues of Chief Cody at the Kansas City Police Department. They all asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation (though the Record corroborated these claims).
One source describes Cody as “the absolute worst commander I ever experienced.” Was that person’s name in the folder that Chief Cody looked through?
How about the multiple sources who told the Record about a conversation in which, threatened with a transfer to the dispatch department, Cody said in order to get moved back out of the department he would have found “the skinniest and prettiest girl down there and fucked her.” Did Cody see those sources’ names? That they were talking anonymously to the Record reporter?
And what about the three anonymous sources who told the Record about the time Cody ran over a dead body with his car?
Cody didn’t respond to my emails asking if he’d talk about the raids.
But the fact that Cody was permitted to execute this search warrant, unchecked, as if the safeguards of the Privacy Protection Act didn’t even exist, it put those sources in danger. It put the reporter in danger. And it put the reporting in danger. Because who’s going to feel comfortable whistleblowing on a powerful cop if they know that cop can easily go pore over a newspaper’s files?
It can be a little tricky to grasp what we’re talking about when we talk about press protections — shield laws, illegal searches, source protection, etc. It can feel theoretical. But this minute and a half of video brings the threat into stark relief, I think. This is why these laws are important. And this is why we need to make sure the cops follow them.
If you haven’t listened yet, check out our Mystery in Marion series right now.
Talk to you soon.
Brian
