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8.9.2000
BOB KERR
A photographer does her job and gets mugged
We have great photographers at The Journal. No newspaper has better.

They have incredible eyes. They capture images most of us would never see.

A month ago, Frieda Squires took a picture of two boys peering into a bookstore on the morning that the latest Harry Potter book went on sale. The expressions on their faces spoke volumes about the special thrill of opening a book and going to new places.

Last Sunday, Rachel Ritchie took a picture of a man with a gun leaving a Puerto Rican street fair in Providence after he had allegedly shot four people. The expression on his face spoke volumes, too.

Two photographers in very different situations looked into the faces of people who, by choice or obsession, defined the best and worst of human possibility. And the photographers gave us those faces in the next day's paper, filled with wonder in one case, fear and hatred in the other.

It is what they do, and they do it so damn well. While reporters might be able to ease back a little with their notebooks, photographers have to stick their heads up and point their cameras at what's going on.

Photographers are a very special part of the newspaper. So we tend to get upset when one of them gets mugged at the front door. We hate to see the talent getting manhandled.

When Rachel Ritchie was at that street fair Sunday and she heard gunfire, she didn't do what I would have done or what most people would have done. She didn't dive for cover.

She started taking pictures.

And because she was so gutsy, she got the picture of the man and the gun. It was dramatic. And it was evidence.

She told a police officer she thought she might have a picture of the shooter. She was willing to share the picture with the police, and, later, editors at the paper agreed that a print of the picture could be given to them.

But that didn't stop the police from a show of force. It smacked of countries where the truth can get a person in trouble.

When she got to the door of The Journal, Ritchie was stopped by the officer she had spoken to and told she had to give up her film. She refused. The officer restrained her, then called police headquarters. And the street outside The Journal filled with police cruisers -- city and state. All because a woman was standing on principle.

Ritchie says her arm was forced behind her back and she was forced to the ground.

Meanwhile, as all this force was being brought to bear on one photographer at the door of her newspaper, the bad guy was apparently speeding away to Massachusetts.

Ritchie was taken to police headquarters, where someone was able to take a firm grasp of the obvious and decide that she should be returned to the newspaper with cameras and film.

The Police Department got a picture of the shooter -- probably sooner than it would have had the officer grabbed Ritchie's cameras. None of this stupid, stormtrooper routine was needed.

This was an assault, pure and simple. It was an assault on Ritchie and an assault on The Journal. The police can try to plead it was all a failure to communicate, but the officers on Fountain Street Sunday afternoon knew where they were and whom they were dealing with.

It is sadly reminiscent of an incident last November when Farnaz Fassihi, then a Journal reporter, was threatened with arrest by a Rhode Island state trooper if she did not give up her notebook while she was covering the aftermath of the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990. There was absolutely no justification for that heavy-handed police intrusion, either.

Two women just doing their jobs. And two police officers deciding that they have the right to interfere and take away the tools of their work.

We are waiting for the outrage to build.

Bob Kerr can be reached by e-mail at bkerr@projo.com