Listen to Statesman News Network

Opinion: Police need accountability after jailing citizen journalist

Caroline Grace Brothers and Daryl James
Priscilla Villarreal, who uses the nickname "Lagordiloca," covers a rollover collision in Laredo, Texas.

Social media reporter Priscilla Villarreal racked up new friends and fans when she grabbed her cellphone and started livestreaming police incidents in Laredo, Texas. She also made powerful enemies.

Calling herself “Lagordiloca,” an endearing nickname that means “the big crazy lady” in Spanish, Villarreal operated as a one-woman news outlet. She posted raw footage of violent crime scenes, traffic accidents and immigration raids to her Facebook page, along with commentary that was sometimes critical of law enforcement. Her unfiltered reporting style earned her more than 120,000 followers — eight times the audience of the local newspaper. But it also provoked the ire of police.

Over time, officers started showing hostility. They smeared Villarreal as a “five-time convicted felon,” even though she has no felony convictions. They threatened to take her phone as evidence at a shooting scene. And they impeded her work for a towing company at a traffic incident.

Ultimately, the police found an obscure law, rarely used to prosecute anyone, against “misuse of official information” and twisted the statute to criminalize Villarreal’s newsgathering. They cited two instances in which Villarreal had asked government sources to confirm information she already had collected on her own. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters do the same thing every day.

One story involved a U.S. Customs and Border Protection employee who committed suicide by jumping off a highway overpass. Villarreal obtained the man’s name and published it before police were ready to divulge his identity, which they were obligated to do under the Texas Public Information Act. The second story involved a fatal traffic accident that included identifying information.

Based on those incidents, Laredo police issued an arrest warrant. When Villarreal turned herself in on Dec. 13, 2017, officers laughed, took photos and then locked her up in the county jail.

A judge tossed the criminal case three months later, ruling that the statute was unconstitutionally vague. But nothing was done to compensate Villarreal for the retaliatory, premeditated violations of her constitutional rights.

She filed a civil lawsuit for damages, but the trial court ruled against her using a legal doctrine called “qualified immunity.” This judge-made rule, invented by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982, shields bad government actors from personal responsibility unless their behavior is clearly established as unconstitutional in prior cases.

Rather than accept the outrage, Villarreal challenged the ruling in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Oral arguments will hinge on how far the justice system will go to excuse illegal government conduct.

Defenders of qualified immunity emphasize the split-second decisions that officers sometimes make in the field. The argument suggests that second-guessing police in a clinical environment like a courtroom could have a chilling effect, causing officers to hesitate in life-or-death situations. Although dubious, that reasoning does not even apply to situations like the one involving Villarreal, where abuse happens over weeks and months.

As the nonprofit Institute for Justice argues in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Sept. 17, Villarreal was not a random suspect at an unfamiliar scene. Police specifically targeted her for retaliation. They devised a plan. They slept on it. And then they put her in handcuffs.

Most importantly, they should have known what they were doing was wrong. The First and Fourteenth Amendments have been on the books for decades. Few things could be as clearly established as the fundamental guarantees of free speech and equal protection under the law.

Professional journalists regularly ask for information from government officials who are not designated spokespeople, and nobody faces arrest for doing so. “Lagordiloca” has a right to scrutinize police in the same manner, and so do her Facebook followers.

Brothers is an attorney and James is a writer at the Institute for Justice, a national law firm with offices in Austin and elsewhere.