Reporter says police tried to break down door after he wouldn’t reveal source

Journalist Bryan Carmody told the San Francisco Examiner that police tried to break down his door Friday morning after he refused to identify the source who provided him with a confidential police report.

Carmody told the outlet that police and FBI agents searched his home and office because he had obtained a copy of the police report detailing public defender Jeff Adachi’s February death.

Two weeks prior, police investigators showed up at his home to ask him — politely, Carmody noted — to identify the source who gave him the report.

{mosads}On Friday, investigators confiscated his cellphones, his computers and a copy of the police report from his office safe.

“They have completely shut down my business,” Carmody, who has operated as an independent stringer for Bay Area and national television stations, including Fox News, CNBC and “CBS Evening News,” told the Examiner.

Carmody accused police of “intimidation” to “make me break my [journalistic] ethics.”

“I’m refusing to give up my source,” he added.

A San Francisco Police spokesperson defended the department’s actions in a statement obtained by the Examiner on Friday, saying that the warrant was granted by a judge and that the raid was “part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the leak of the Adachi police report.”

“Today’s actions are one step in the process of investigating a potential case of obstruction of justice along with the illegal distribution of a confidential police report,” the statement reportedly read.

Carmody told the Examiner that police tried to use “a sledgehammer” to break down the door to his home.

“They were in the process of breaking my gate down at which time I woke up and let them in,” Carmody said, adding that authorities had guns drawn and searched “my entire house from attic to garage.”

Carmody said that he was detained in handcuffs for several hours as police brought him with them to his office, where they found the police report in a safe.