A CNN reporter and crew have been arrested live on air while covering the Minneapolis protests over the killing of George Floyd.
Black correspondent Omar Jimenez had just shown a protester being arrested when about half a dozen white police officers surrounded him.
Mr Jimenez told the Minnesota State Patrol officers: “We can move back to where you like”, before explaining that he and his crew were members of the press, adding: “We’re getting out of your way.”
The journalist was handcuffed and led away alongside a producer and camera operator for CNN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIClA57jWmQ&t=138s
accompanying story from same publication's site:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cnn-report...
If we believe the journalists that they were legally in the area, and the police either knew this or at least didn't have probable cause to support that they weren't legally in the area, I don't see how both of the above crimes were not committed.
[Edit: This argument is a lot weaker than I thought it was because it's not entirely clear that the message I claim was communicated to the police was actually successfully communicated. See the replies/video below] Specifically I certainly don't believe that the journalists actually committed a crime if they had instructions from another cop that they could stand there. Those instructions would tend to negate any general order, and even if it didn't legally negate the order it would constitute entrapment and functionally negate it anyways. As a result I don't believe the police would think they had probable cause after they heard the camera crew claim they had received that instruction (and amusingly this is regardless of whether or not the camera crew had actually received the instruction they claimed to have received - to make it false arrest/kidnapping it suffices to be a probable enough claim that the police no longer believe they have probable cause).
A secondary weaker argument is that the governors order excluded the press from the curfew so even if the police had issued an order which included the press that order was illegal as applied to the press, and as a result they had no probable cause to arrest the press. It's weaker because to show they committed a crime under this theory I suspect (without checking Minnesota's statutes) you'd have to show they were aware of the contents of the governors order.
IANAL/I am not aware of the details of Minnesota's statutes - obviously details of the statues might change the above analysis in either direction.
At what timestamp did the journalists tell the police officers that they had been instructed to stand there by another cop? I must've missed that part when I watched the video.
I remembered this as being stated too the cops much clearer than it actually was. Likely I was mixing what they said with what the CNN reporters said later on when they were replaying this clip.