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 Updated: Aug. 12.
Two minutes after midnight is when they knocked on my front door.
It was 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 stepped outside to talk with them. Hours before, the same cops ordered me off a public street, in violation of New York’s Right to Record law, in a failed attempt to stop me from reporting on a crash: a pick-up plowed into a bicyclist, sending the cyclist to the emergency room with injuries so serious cops believed he might die. He didn’t.
“Why you guys at my house?,” I asked.
“The family that you’re messaging, that was involved in the accident,” Malone village sergeant Brian T. Miller said "You need to not message them anymore."
Sgt. Miller called it an “accident.” Two days later, the Malone Village Police Chief told The Free Lance News it might be a crime. An investigation was underway to determine whether charges would be filed, Chief William T. Andre wrote in an Aug. 4 email.
It would take one to two months, he added.
I'd left my own body-camera on my desk, and gave the cops who knocked on my door at midnight the courtesy of talking to them without it. They, of course, had their body-cameras on.
"I didn’t,” I interrupted Sgt. Miller. “Hold up …”
“I’m just conveying a message,” Sgt. Miller disclosed. “If you are messaging them, on any level, they’re gonna pursue charges against you. So, don’t.”
“Who are you talking about?,” I asked, not sure if he was talking about the victim’s family, the driver’s family or any one of the families I spoke with who may have witnessed the calamity.
“The Monettes,” Sgt. Miller answered, referring to the parents of the 21-year-old driver of the pick-up truck, Benjamin Monette.
“They messaged me,” I corrected Sgt. Miller. “And they asked me to call them. And they threatened me.”
“How’d they threaten you?",” he asked.
“You need to take that down right now," Corey Monette barked at me, referring to my report on his son's crash. "I’m not playing with you.”
That wasn’t enough of a threat for Sgt. Miller. Besides, the police sergeant declared, “You’re report was nothing but a huge lie.”
He turned to walk away as he said this.
“Which part?,” I asked, still doing my job and trying to see if there was anything actually inccurate in my reporting from earlier that day.
But Sgt. Miller wasn’t trying to be helpful. He was trying to scare me into silence.
“All of it,” MIller said. “Don’t contact him anymore. Period.”
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.
Sgt. Miller appeared to have forgotten that two months ago he invited me into his office at Malone village police headquarters, closed the door behind us, 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 it seemed to me he was trying to “gas me up” to go smoke said scumbag since he, the police, failed to bring him to justice.
But I kept my mouth shut because I had to rely on the police to protect someone close to me.
Back two months ago, Sgt. Miller and other Malone police told me arresting the 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’s what I’ve been able to figure out (since the police are threatening to arrest me for reporting instead of sharing what should be public information).
As the police slinked back to their police vehicles in the dark, after delivering their “message,” I spoke out: “You just came to a reporter’s house in the middle of the night and knocked on the door … You should think about that.”
Like the secret police do in Totalitarian countries like Russia or China or North Korea, 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.
Sgt. Miller stopped and turned back to answer me: “What do I need to think about? I did my job.”
“And I did mine,” I replied.
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."
EDITOR’S NOTE: Two days after this report was published, the Police Chief of the Malone Village Police Department confirmed that The Free Lance News’s reporting was correct. That the crash may be a crime not an accident—despite Sgt. Miller calling it an accident that night and calling “all” of The Free Lance News’s reporting false.
“The investigation is still ongoing,” Chief William T. Andre wrote in an Aug. 4 email. “No citations or other charges have been filed against either party while we await results from accident reconstruction.”
Also, when we received police body camera video, we replaced the approximate words originally used with actual quotes spoken verbatim.
Send tips or corrections to jasonbnicholas@gmail.com or, if you prefer, thefreelancenews@proton.me