Who you can trust in America’s most ‘decisive moment’

History happens in the blink of an eye.When all of the lies Trump and his ministry of homeland insecurity have spread about the killing of American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis have turned to dust, the truth will remain. The facts of what happened in the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are preserved in the cellphone videos made by witnesses, and they provide remarkable multi-angle documentary evidence of the use of lethal force by federal agents.The shootings capped a month in which the nation has come closest to tearing itself apart since the Civil War. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pondered recently whether we were again at a “Fort Sumter” moment, referring to when Confederate forces fired the first shots in 1861. The chaos reached a zenith in Minneapolis, a blue city in a blue state that has been targeted by the Trump administration, but all of America has experienced tyranny in the name of immigration enforcement. One of the things that made America different than other nations, my father used to say, is that we didn’t have to show our papers.That is no longer the case.Amid the stream of coverage of state-sponsored violence you may have missed the stories of the journalists who have been arrested, detained, roughed up, or otherwise prevented by federal agents from doing their jobs. Former CNN anchor Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort have been indicted for covering an anti-ICE protest at a St. Paul church Many of those targeted, like Fort and NPR’s Meg Anderson, are also members of the community they’re covering. They are keenly aware that what they are covering is the sort of thing we thought only happened in other countries.“I described the day (Good was shot) — the juxtaposition of the very normal and the very not normal — to my colleague Kat Lonsdorf, who has covered the war in Ukraine,” Anderson recalled for NPR. “She told me that sounded like Kyiv to her. Some days, you’re interviewing people about the horrors they’ve seen. Other days, you’re eating arepas at a restaurant. Life more or less continues, until it doesn’t.”Independent photographer John Abernathy is also a resident of Minneapolis, and on Jan. 15 he was covering a veteran-led protest at the Whipple federal building, a facility used by ICE. He told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that he was targeted by federal agents. They shot him with crowd control munitions, sent tear gas his way, pepper-sprayed him and tackled him to the ground.His ordeal began when agents fired a flash-bang or some other device into a group of protestors, and he made his way over to the action.“I went over to see what was happening, to possibly photograph it, and while I was there, I got shot twice with pepper bullets,” Abernathy said.The non-lethal bullets were painful, he said, and he crossed the street away from the disturbance. But agents came from behind and tackled him. He was facedown, he said, and didn’t know what was happening.“Then they set off a tear gas canister very close to me,” he said. “The smoke was so thick that I couldn’t breathe, and I was gagging. At one point, I thought, ‘I’m either going to throw up or I’m going to pass out.’ I yelled my name out, and then I yelled, ‘I can’t breathe.’ And when that came out of my mouth, I realized, ‘This s—- is getting real.’”“I can’t breathe” is what George Floyd said in 2020 while in police custody in Minneapolis, slowly being asphyxiated by a cop’s knee on the back of his neck.Fearing that his camera would be seized by agents, Abernathy tossed the Leica to another photographer, who managed to scoop it up. The agents then shot pepper spray into Abernathy’s face, causing intense pain, and pulled him up, handcuffed him and took him inside the Whipple building for questioning.The metadata in Abernathy’s camera showed the encounter, from the time he was tackled to when he was fully restrained, lasted only eight seconds.Even though we now have an army of Zapruders documenting what is going on in Minneapolis and elsewhere, we still need the expertise of Abernathy and photojournalists like him. What they provide is an independent source of still and video images and the context needed to understand them. The modern photojournalistic era goes back to Roy Stryker, the Farm Security Administration photo chief, who during the Great Depression urged his photographers to do enough research to understand a story before shooting it. Photojournalists also have the advantage of being part of a discipline that rejects photo manipulation. The White House recently released an AI-doctored photo of a demonstrator taken into custody while disrupting a church service in Minneapolis, making the woman appear distraught when in fact she had remained calm.After Abernathy was released from custody, and treated for his wounds at a hospital, he thanked Pierre Lavie, the photographer who saved his Leica — and took a photo of him in the act of tossing the expensive camera, a moment that took only the blink of an eye.“It represents so much more than me,” Abernathy told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. “It’s a photo of the struggle against something the whole world is watching.”I knew exactly the pain and confusion Abernathy was talking about.In April 1983, I was tackled by a cop while covering a protest in Joplin, Missouri.I was 24 years old and had been sent by my editor to take photos of the police writing tickets to demonstrators outside Billy’s, a bar known for its gay clientele. The picketers had been there once before, with a permit, but now they didn’t have one. I parked my red Pinto around the corner from the bar, then grabbed my 35mm Olympus and went to work. There were a half-dozen or so cops on the scene, giving misdemeanor tickets to the protestors, who were proudly waving signs with slogans that I won’t repeat here. It was the early days of the AIDS crisis, and some signs mentioned “bad blood,” while others invoked God.One of the protestors was a rough-looking fellow who kept staring at me. What I didn’t know was that earlier a few patrons had come out of the bar and taken some snapshots, but they were ordered to go back inside by police. While I made my photos, I was keeping an eye on this one protestor who seemed to dislike me and wasn’t worried about the police. I had not been issued credentials by the newspaper to wear because that wasn’t routinely done in those days, at least not at a small daily.When one of the cops, a man over 6 feet, told me to go back into the bar, I was confused. I told him I hadn’t come from the bar. Before I could explain I was on assignment and that I had a Constitutional right to gather news photos on a public sidewalk, I found myself knocked over the curb and I was down on Main Street.The cop had tackled me.I remember the pavement was cold.My camera had fallen from my hands and bounced out of reach. The lens was broken, and shards of the filter littered the pavement. I had no idea what had happened at first, other than I was on the ground and a great weight was upon me. When I reached for my camera, the tall cop — whose knee was in the small of my back — grabbed my hand and forced it behind me and clamped a cuff around my wrist. I yelled in pain and began to curse.Some of the other cops were on me now. I remember being kneed and kicked. The cops later disputed this, but I know what I felt. One of them stepped on my palm, and the metal bracelet of the handcuff took the skin off the back of my right hand. Then he cuffed both wrists together and pulled me off the ground. The buttons of my flannel shirt had been popped off, I had bruises everywhere, and I was bleeding. I was then thrown in a police car, driven to the police department and booked on charges of obstructing a police officer.I was released to the newspaper’s managing editor, my injuries photographed, and taken to a local hospital to be checked out. Nothing was broken, but I would be in pain for weeks. Then I told the story of what had happened, to the other editors, to the newspaper’s attorney, to a reporter assigned to cover the story. After I explained that I believed my First Amendment rights to gather news had been violated, the reporter paused. Let me give you some advice, I was told. Everybody’s tired of hearing about Constitutional rights. I’m gonna do you a favor and not quote you.That moment changed me. The reporter’s advice did not reflect the newspaper’s official attitude, or the chain that owned it, or even that of the newsroom, but it was crushing. Who was I to argue? I was 24 years old. But when the huge chain that owned the little daily — the Joplin Globe — heard of the incident, they quickly argued it as a First Amendment issue.From then on, I felt like a journalistic outsider. I no longer believed in objectivity and saw fairness as a better goal. Machines are objective, human beings are not. Reporting without compassion is stenography. The truth is not what people say, it’s what they do.My biggest frustration was not being able to report about what had happened, to being reduced to just another source by my own newspaper. I understood why, because I had become part of the story. But I would have liked to have had the opportunity to write about some of those who sought me out, the poor and the minorities and the patrons of the bar, to tell their stories of being mistreated by police.I remember one Black minister who walked up the stairs to the newsroom with a stack of photos of individuals who had received far rougher treatment than I experienced. One was of a young man beaten with a flashlight. In the photo, he was lying bloody and unconscious in the back of his Mustang Fastback. I told the preacher I wanted to help but the lawyers had advised me against writing about anything alleging police brutality. He said he didn’t know where else to turn, he said, because others just wouldn’t listen.That was the smallest I had ever felt in a newsroom. The failure is with me still. I should have helped, should have written about the victims in those photos, should have found some outlet that would publish it. But I was scared and the charges against me, incredibly enough, were still pending. It had been a high-profile legal battle from the start, and the cops wouldn’t even release the incident report.The case went to trial a year later. The cop who took me to the ground claimed I had assaulted him. I had not. I remember what the newspaper’s attorney told the jury during the closing: This isn’t Russia. We’re not a police state. I was acquitted, thanks in large part to that argument and to a police officer who broke ranks and told the truth of what he had seen. I was so overwhelmed that my trust in the court system had been validated that in a spontaneous moment I reached over and offered my hand to the prosecutor. He recoiled a bit, gave it a moment’s thought, and then shook it.I’m not going to name the cop who tackled me. There’s no point, and he’s long since died. But I still carry a thin scar on the back of my right hand, a reminder of sudden violence.None of what I experienced then compares with what is happening in Minnesota now. My “altercation” on Main Street in Joplin, as it was described in the first news reports, was an early skirmish in a political trajectory that would see journalists go from among the most trusted by Americans, in the age of Walter Cronkite and Watergate, to among the most vilified during the era of Trump.Now we are at another inflection point. This isn’t Kent State, but it’s as close as we’ve gotten to 1970 since. As the federal government kills its own citizens and lies about it, as the White House releases doctored photos reminiscent of Stalin’s regime, and as ordinary citizens feel they must take to the streets to protect their friends and neighbors, there seems to be a growing trust in the press.We need all the thousands of citizen observers who are documenting with their phones what is happening on the streets of Minneapolis and in towns across the country. We also need reporters and the photojournalists who bring their experience and training to bear in service of the public. Readers can trust that a photograph from the Associated Press, or the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Topeka Capital-Journal or the Kansas Reflector won’t be doctored. Those photographs may also capture what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment,” an instant in which the significance of a moment is captured for history.When Abernathy threw his Leica, that was a decisive moment.Photojournalism also has the advantage of a point of view. Every photograph has a spatial relationship to its subject, which gives context and humanity to the image. Sometimes, that humanity is emphasized when that POV is literally from ground level. There is a new understanding when the witness sees what the victims have seen.Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

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