In “Times reporter recounts being hit with tear gas and rubber bullets by Minnesota police”, the Los Angeles Times’s Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports that around 8:30pm on Saturday night in Minneapolis, about two dozen Minneapolis police and and sheriff’s deputies attacked reporters covering the police advance on peaceful demonstrators at an intersection outside Minneapolis’s 5th Precinct. The officers turned from the demonstrators and used tear gas and rubber bullets on the reporters, without issuing any orders to the reporters as to where to go.
Hennessy-Fiske’s leg was injured by rubber bullets. She managed to hide in a senior apartment complex that also let a few fleeing protesters hide.
Molly Hennessy-Fiske was formerly the Times’s Middle East bureau chief before returning to the US to become the bureau chief in Houston. She writes:
I’ve covered protests involving police in Ferguson, Mo., Baton Rouge, La., Dallas and Los Angeles. I’ve also covered the U.S. military in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan. I have never been fired at by police until tonight.
Welcome to Donald Trump’s world, Ms. Hennessy-Fiske. Curfew is 8pm and Minneapolis police evidently don’t care whether you are a reporter or have other legitimate reasons to be out: it’s tear gas and rubber bullets for you. The current top headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune approvingly reads “SWIFT SHOW OF FORCE IN MPLS. PUSHES OUT CURFEW VIOLATORS”, and Donald Trump is tweeting “The National Guard has been released in Minneapolis … No games!”