Aiming for privacy, Monterey County courts go too far, limiting transparency.

Because it’s part of our covetous DNA, journalists hate it when things get taken away from us. Try to stop us from doing what we’ve always done and we get grumpy.

That’s how it went in June 2017, when law enforcement agencies countywide switched their radio communications to what’s known as a Next Generation Public Safety Radio System (NGEN) as a way of facilitating better communications.

The problem for journalists is that NGEN is encrypted. That means no more listening to scanner traffic, and possibly catching early wind of stories, so we can deploy photographers and reporters as needed. We complained mightily, and it got us nowhere. Instead of being able to hear the early indicators of incidents, we play catch-up. Instead of chasing and reporting, we have become passive, receiving press releases from law enforcement – and that’s if we’re lucky. Some agencies don’t even bother.

We had the opportunity to complain again March 6 over another thing being taken away – this time courtesy of Monterey County Superior Court officials. Last Aug. 15, at a meeting the presiding judge holds annually with the media, the court issued an order stating nobody could photograph or videotape in the court hallways, entrances, exits or elevators without written permission from a judge.

The order means, in essence, when attorneys leave a courtroom after a hearing and we interview them, we can’t take pictures or video or press record. When teenage murder defendant Gonzalo Curiel’s entire family came – for the first time – to his hearing earlier this month, we weren’t allowed to photograph them leaving the courtroom en masse. If people on opposing sides of a case start brawling in the hallways (and that happens too), no pictures or video.

There are newsworthy things that happen in those halls, and while we were once allowed to capture those images, that was over as of Auguust. We long thought of the hallways as public space. Now we were being told it was not.

What changed? Members of the local press corps had another meeting this week with Presiding Judge Lydia Villarreal to talk about it. She said the new rule was a year in the making, prompted mainly by the court’s desire to protect privacy.

“My main motivation is really trying to make sure the court is a safe place for the people who come here,” Villarreal said. “Aside from people who work here, 90 percent of the people who are here are here because the court has ordered it. Jurors have been ordered to be here, witnesses have been ordered to be here, defendants have been ordered to be here, and we need to protect their privacy.”

She invoked the specter of federal agents coming to arrest and deport the undocumented.

“We’ve been under threat of having ICE come to all courthouses, and we very much want people who are undocumented to feel safe coming here, without worrying someone is taking their picture,” she said.

Part of the problem, she adds, is when the public sees the press using cell phones to record or photograph, they feel they can do it too. In court, we seek and receive written permission from a judge to document hearings with laptops, cell phones and cameras, and bailiffs are there to monitor that activity. Not so in the halls.

“We have a lot of gang cases and gang members take pictures of witnesses. They do it so they can show their gang who witnesses are,” Villarreal said. “They want the highly emotional pictures of people crying so they can brag about it: ‘Look, she’s a mom and she’s that upset, our gang did that.’”

Weekly editor Sara Rubin, backed by California News Publishers Association attorney Nikki Moore, sent Villarreal a letter stating the new restrictions are an overreach that places an unconstitutional restraint on free speech by effectively banning it from hallways, elevators and exits.

While Villarreal’s argument against those points made sense, I found myself agreeing with KSBW News Director Lawton Dodd during the discussion.

Villarreal said the court has an obligation to the people ordered to appear. Says Dodd: “There’s also a need to respect the public transparency in how the courts work, and I think my colleagues would submit this rule detracts from that.”

MARY DUAN writes Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at maryrduan@gmail.com