MIAMI -- For WPLG-TV news co-anchor and reporter Doug Dunbar, being "embedded" with the police during the melees that erupted outside this week's Free Trade of the Americas talks enhanced his station's coverage.
"I think we had a little more than if we were just walking around," said Dunbar, who was with front-line police during Thursday's clashes. It also had a practical benefit - he knew when the officers were about to use gas and could don his mask.
The program, which is believed to be the biggest use of embedded reporters for a large-scale U.S. police operation, allowed about two dozen reporters and photographers to accompany police each day as they confronted anti-globlazation demonstrators.
But the program was a disappointment for some reporters, especially Thursday when protesters took to the streets and clashed with police. Officers fired rubber bullets, bean bags and tear and pepper gas at demonstrators, who threw water bottles and debris and fired slingshots at them.
Some embeds wound up far from the action. Others had difficulty getting to their embed units because they were blocked or slowed by police checkpoints. And some reporters were simply left behind when their embed units were mobilized earlier than planned as protesters swarmed the streets and threatened chaos.
Miami police spokeswoman Herminia Salas-Jacobson said that at least five media embed teams encountered problems Thursday.
"We had to change our plan and had to make certain operational decisions, and a lot of that obviously inconveniences members of the media trying to get into an event ... but these are steps we need to take to ensure the safety of everyone out here," Salas-Jacobson said.
Police Chief John Timoney created the embedding program after doing something similar when he was Philadelphia's commissioner during the 2000 Republican Party national convention. Some reporters even accompanied him as he bicycled through the demonstrations.
Susannah Nesmith, a Miami Herald reporter who spent the week with a police mobile strike force, said her coverage was just one part of the paper's many angles on the story.
"I think our coverage was better informed because we had me in there," she said. "It was very similar to police ride alongs, which reporters have been doing for decades. Necessary, unnecessary, I don't know. I got good information from it."
But others said being an embed didn't give them better access to the action than non-embedded reporters had. And they said, at times, being embedded actually prevented them from getting opportunities they ordinarily would have had if they were moving about freely on their own.
Taimy Alvarez, a photographer with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, was embedded with a cut team, the officers responsible for carefully cutting protesters out of contraptions they create to link themselves. Protesters on Thursday never used that tactic, and Alvarez watched the melees on TV at the team's staging area.
"There wasn't anything to cut," she said. "We didn't go anywhere. When you're photographing the cut team, you want to see them cut."
However, Salas-Jacobson said that while there were glitches, the embedding process was a success for the department and it gave journalists a chance to see what it's like to be a police officer.
"You tasted some of the gas, you're tired, you're carrying gear and you've been walking for miles," she said. "This is the truth about police work. Now you understand it a lot better."
Still, most other journalists were on the other side of the police line, and often found themselves in the line of fire when officers clashed with demonstrators. Several reporters received minor injuries.
Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz said he was standing between a crowd of protesters and the police lines when someone threw a rock toward the officers.
"Things went wild," said Diaz, who was hit by three rubber bullets and pepper spray.
"You're in between both," he said of the two sides. "You are bound to get hit by one or both."
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