The Insider

All he needs to do is ask Bradford, who cites gripes from a range of news operations that HPD flacks are slow to respond or prone to play favorites -- to the extent of giving reporters' exclusives to competitors.

Bradford was initially surprised by the complaints, since Cato, by virtue of his background as a reporter, had been expected to improve police-media relations. But Bradford says he's spoken to some news folks who feel news-gathering is "being blocked to a greater extent" under Cato than under his predecessors. That's saying a lot, considering that one of them was Rick Hartley, once described by a veteran cop-shop reporter as a "speed bump on the information highway."

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