Monique Bond, CPD Spokesperson

UPDATE: Mike Anzaldi has been cleared of all charges. Read the post here.

We checked back in with Mike Anzaldi, the freelance photojournalist who was arrested by the Chicago Police Department October 22 at a crime scene. Thinking we’d hear about the status of his arrest, we were shocked to learn he’d been arrested again – and the second offense is even more outlandish than the first!

As we posted before, Anzaldi was arrested and his equipment was confiscated, and about 500 images were deleted from his memory card, when the Chicago police decided that he wasn’t allowed to film a crime scene from a neighbor’s private property. He was charged with obstruction and resisting arrest and his status hearing is set for November 19.

On November 3, Anzaldi responded to a report of shots fired at a church. When he got there, it turned out a man had brought a plastic gun into a shelter and there was no crime after all, but Anzaldi decided to shoot a few minutes of footage just in case. As he was doing this, he was approached by an officer who told him he couldn’t stand where he was standing and then asked to see his credentials.

This officer called his name into the dispatcher – here’s where it gets weird – and the dispatcher apparently told her to detain him. The officers on the scene were confused and clearly not in the loop, but nonetheless were following orders from above. After some back and forth with higher-ups, the officer told Anzaldi that there was some sort of problem with his ID but the computer in her car was broken, so she asked him to come to the station to clear things up. They promised it would take 15 minutes and they’d return him to his car. Anzaldi admits it was foolish of him to willingly go with them, but understand it from his point of view – it was not a crime scene, he had done nothing wrong, it was not a confrontational situation, and he never imagined anything would come of it.

Continue reading ‘Chicago Photographer Arrested Again – CPD on the Warpath’