(FLIP/IFEX) – Two officers of the police department in the western city of Pereira demanded that an “El Diario de Otún” journalist erase photographs he had taken of police evicting a street vendor from a public space. On 31 October 2006 at 4:30 p.m. (local time), two officers who had participated in the action entered […]
(FLIP/IFEX) – Two officers of the police department in the western city of Pereira demanded that an “El Diario de Otún” journalist erase photographs he had taken of police evicting a street vendor from a public space.
On 31 October 2006 at 4:30 p.m. (local time), two officers who had participated in the action entered the newspaper’s offices and asked to meet with the photographer who had been taking pictures at the scene. Apparently, some passersby who witnessed the eviction operation and who had also taken photographs with their cellular phones were also obliged by police to erase them.
According to “El Diario del Otún” editor-in-chief Marta Lucía Manosalva, the armed officials entered the newspaper’s offices, which are located across the street from the scene of the operation, determined to ensure the photographs were erased. The emphatic opposition of the journalists present eventually dissuaded the officers from their mission.
The Pereira chief of police, Lieutenant Coronel José Antonio Poveda Montes, told FLIP that the action of the two officers was an isolated act of misconduct, attributable to the fact that they did not realize that it was a newspaper office they had entered nor that the person taking the photographs was a journalist.
Poveda Montes also observed that police are generally armed, and that those people who were forced to erase photographs from their cellular phones should file any complaints about police misconduct with the Ombudsperson.
FLIP condemns the arbitrary intrusion of the police into the offices of “El Diario del Otún” and their unjustifiable demand that the photographer erase the pictures he had taken of the police action. Outside certain exceptions stipulated by law, citizens have the constitutional right to access to information. This right encompasses the right to access to public spaces in which acts of general import take place.
