The City of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $500,000 to two reporters to settle their wrongful arrest lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department in a case where 25 law students in the UC Irvine School of Law’s Press Freedom Project worked on the litigation over four years.
The payment resolves the civil rights lawsuit brought by reporters Jonathan Peltz and Kathleen Gallagher, who claimed the LAPD violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights and the California Bane Act by arresting them for simply doing their jobs — peacefully reporting about a protest and police actions at Echo Park Lake on March 25, 2021.
The settlement was reached one day before the trial was set to begin in federal court in downtown Los Angeles before U.S. District Judge Hernán Vera.
Peltz and Gallagher filed their civil rights lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles in 2022. The UCI Irvine School of Law’s Press Freedom Project worked as co-counsel with the Pasadena law firm of Hadsell Stormer Renick and Dai on the case. The Press Freedom Project is part of the law school’s Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic.
The Civil Rights Case Provided Intense Litigation Experience for Law Students
“This case provided an amazing experience for law students who are interested in being litigators, especially civil rights lawyers,” said UCI Adjunct Clinical Law Professor Susan E. Seager, who founded the Press Freedom Project to provide free legal services to journalists who lack financial resources to fight for their First Amendment rights and who supervised the students working on the Peltz/Gallagher case. “The students did everything a litigator does – from interviewing clients and filing a civil rights complaint in federal court to preparing questions for depositions, writing legal memos about legal theories of the case and working on an expert report.”
The 25 UCI law students who worked on the case are Delara Abbasi, Morgan Chall, Valentina Comar, Sara Denk, Brian Fiumara, Benjamin Fried, Leon He, Catherine Hilgen, Ashley Huston, Yucy Jia, Wesley Juels, Karen Kirollos, Sanjna Kulkarni, Brian Ligh, Leah Mohammadi, Drew Navarre, Evelyn Oates, Juliana Rosenfeld, Arletha Saint-Jean, Kayla Shojai, Xiaohan Sun, Joshua Trinh, Zoe Vikstrom, Bonnie Wong, and Richard Yoo
The UCI students’ tasks included interviewing the clients, preparing an administrative claim for damages, drafting the lawsuit, conducting legal research on the constitutional and statutory claims, drafting legal memos about the theories of the case, reviewing and analyzing hundreds of pages of memos, emails, and other written documents produced by the city in discovery, reviewing police videos and body worn camera video, preparing deposition questions, attending depositions, reviewing deposition transcripts, preparing materials for the plaintiffs’ expert and assisting with the preparation of the expert report, and preparing deposition summaries, Seager said.
The Reporters Claimed the LAPD Violated Their First Amendment Rights
Peltz and Gallagher claimed that the LAPD violated their First Amendment right to free speech by arresting them, zip-tying them, holding them on buses, and taking them to a large jail, all of which preventing them from reporting about the protests over the city’s eviction of a large encampment of unhoused people on the shores of Echo Park Lake and the arrest of protesters. The LAPD held Peltz and Gallagher for four hours and told them they faced criminal charges for failure to disperse. But the reporters were never charged with any wrongdoing.
The LAPD claimed they didn’t know that Peltz and Gallagher were reporters because they didn’t have official LAPD press passes.
But Peltz and Gallagher pointed out that the LAPD’s Deputy Chief Dominic H. Choi sent a memo to the entire LAPD staff saying that reporters don’t need to have an official LAPD-issued press pass to qualify for protections for the press.
Peltz and Gallagher also alleged that the LAPD knew it did something wrong when it detained and zip-tied not only Peltz and Gallagher, but four other reporters, including Los Angeles Times reporter James Queally and Spectrum News 1 reporter Kate Cagle, who had law enforcement-issued press passes and were well-known by the top LAPD management.
The lawsuit cited a text message that then-Chief Michel Moore sent to his command staff the night of March 25, 2021 after he learned that officers had taken LA Times reporter Queally into custody. Chief Moore scolded his command staff and ordered them to immediately release all the reporters, which Peltz and Gallagher alleged was an admission that the LAPD knew it should not have arrested any reporters.
LAPD Has History of Violating Reporters’ First Amendment Right to Cover Protests
Seager said the LAPD has repeatedly ignored the First Amendment right of reporters to cover protests. “For the past 25 years, the LAPD has violated the First Amendment rights of reporters to film and report about protests and the actions of police on public streets,” Seager said.
Seager pointed to the city’s payment of $1.5 million to settle civil rights lawsuits filed by three reporters who were injured by LAPD’s brutal tactics during a march in McArthur Park in 2007. The LAPD also settled a casein 2001 brought by several reporters, including TV consumer reporter David Horowitz, who claimed they were shot and clubbed by officers while they were covering protests during the Democratic National Convention in 2000. The LAPD acknowledged in the settlement in Crespo v. City of Los Angeles that reporters have a First Amendment right to peacefully cover protests.
“Mr. Peltz and Ms. Gallagher experienced firsthand the abusive tactics LAPD uses when they don’t want the press watching and reporting on their bad behavior,” said Kate McFarlane, one of the lawyers representing Peltz and Gallagher with the law firm of Hadsell Stormer Renick and Dai. “This happened over four years ago, but we still see it continuing today. The only way LAPD will learn they cannot and will not get away with suppressing journalists’ First Amendment rights is when people like Mr. Peltz and Ms. Gallagher are brave enough to stand up, speak out, and fight back against this militant organization.”
“We are happy that our clients have finally settled this four-year-old case, but the fight for journalists’ rights is far from over,” said co-counsel Bina Ahmad, also with Hadsell Stormer Renick and Dai. “The LAPD must abide by the law and respect journalists’ rights to observe and report on the LAPD’s actions. If the LAPD is blocking journalists from watching them, what is the LAPD trying to hide? Without journalists, how is the public to know what the LAPD is doing and hold them accountable?”
Reporters Won a Court Order on July 10, 2025 Controlling Police Actions Against the Press
The LAPD is now under partial court control due to a recent civil rights case filed in federal court in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Press Club and Status Coup against the City of Los Angeles. UC Irvine law school’s Press Freedom Project is co-counsel on that case as well.
The new lawsuit alleges that the LAPD’s repeated shooting of reporters with rubber bullets and other projectiles, using police horses to violently shove reporters, and threatening reporters with arrest if they don’t leave the scene of the protests against federal immigration officers in Los Angeles violates the press’s rights both under the First and Fourth Amendments and a new California law that allows reporters to stay behind police lines and remain in place after a dispersal order is issued, Penal Code section 409.7(a).
Judge Vera, who is also assigned to the Los Angeles Press Club case, issued a temporary restraining order on July 10, 2025 blocking the LAPD from shooting rubber bullets and other projectiles at reporters who are not interfering with police, Seager said. Judge Vera’s order also requires the LAPD to call a captain or an officer with a higher rank to the scene if a reporter asserts that they are a member of the press.
The settlement of the Peltz/Gallagher lawsuit includes payments to the reporters and their attorney’s fees. The City admits no wrongdoing and the settlement agreement requires final approval by the City Council. No officers were disciplined for their interactions with reporters, according to a memo prepared by then-Chief Moore.