MALONE NY POLICE KNOCK ON REPORTER’S DOOR AT MIDNIGHT TO THREATEN TO ARREST HIM FOR REPORTING
POLICE IN MALONE, NEW YORK DID NOT LIKE THE FREE LANCE NEWS'S PUBLIC SERVICE REPORTING
MALONE, NEW YORK Aug. 2, 2026
The knock came at midnight.
It was the police. A sergeant and two patrolmen from the town of Malone—a small town on the Canadian border that survives off farming and prisons.
I opened my front door and stepped out onto my front porch to talk with them.
Referring to the father of the driver of a pick-up truck who had just mowed down a man riding a bicycle, the Malone village sergeant Brian T. Miller said "Don't call Monette again."
I'd left my own body-camera on my desk, and gave the cops the courtesy of talking to them without it. They, of course, had their body-cameras on.
"He messaged me and asked me to call him," I told Sgt. Miller, or words to that effect.
"If you call him again you're going to jail," Sgt. Miller replied, or some such.
Nevermind that Corey Monette, the driver's father, all but threatened me when I gave him the courtesy of a call-back.
“You need to take that down right now," he said, referring to my report on his son's crash. "I’m not playing with you.”
That didn't matter to Sgt. Miller.
"That's not a threat," he claimed.
Sgt. Miller appeared to have forgotten that two months ago he invited me into his office at Malone village police headquarters, pulled the blinds shut and detailed the criminal record of a certain scumbag. He told me about all the women the scumbag beat in the past.
I didn't need Sgt. Miller to tell me all that because he was trying to “gas me up” to go smoke said scumbag since he, the police, failed to bring him to justice—or so it seemed to me.
But I kept my mouth shut because I had to rely on the police to protect someone close to me.
Malone Village Police Office Brian T. Miller (l) upon his promition to sergeant in 2024. Photo credit: unknown, via Malone Village Police Department’s Facebook page. Miller has worked as a Malone Village Police Officer for at least 11 years, according to public records.
Back two months ago, Sgt. Miller and other Malone police told me arresting said scumbag was "mandatory," but they never did.
Now Sgt. Miller was threatening to arrest me, for committing the "crime" of reporting—after they let a woman-beater go and a guy in a $75,000, half-ton pick-up truck mow down a poor guy on a bike with no arrest, no ticket, no nothing—at least that what I’ve been able to figure out (since the police are threatening to arrest me for reporting instead of sharing public information).
Is this really the way the criminal “justice” system is supposed to work?
"You should think about what you're doing," I told Sgt. Miller as he and his men slinked back to their police vehicles in the dark.
"What does that mean?," the sergeant yelled or something like it across my freshly-cut front law, adorned with flowers.
"It means you visited a reporter in the middle of the night," I answered.
Like the secret police do in Totalitarian countries like Russia or China, not the good-old US of A.
At least that was the old America. Maybe in authoritarian America threatening reporters is the new normal and Malone police don't want to be left out.
The Columbia Journalism Review reports 2025 was the year "Press Freedom Came Under Direct Attack." More journalists were killed in 2025 than in any other year since groups started counting.
"The number of assaults on reporters in the US nearly equals the last three years combined," the Associated Press reported. "It’s hard to think of a darker time for journalists."
Sad to say, police in Malone, New York are adding to the darkness.
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