Berkeley is abuzz today with news of the strange misstep taken by Police Chief Michael Meehan, who sent an officer to the home of a news reporter to ask for changes to an article.

The knock on door of Doug Oakley's Berkeley home came at 12:45 a.m. Friday, as the Bay Area News Reporter Oakley was sleeping. The Oakland Tribune reports that at first Oakley "and his wife thought something was drastically wrong or perhaps that a relative had died."

Instead, Oakley opened his door to public information officer Sgt. Mary Kusmiss. She was there to ask for changes to an article that Oakley filed hours earlier about a town meeting to discuss the murder of Peter Cukor. "Kusmiss said the chief was very upset that I wrote something in my article that he did not say," Oakley told Berkeley Patch in an email. "[Meehan] wanted me to change it right then on the spot at 1 a.m. I said no way I could do it, and that I would have a look in the morning."

On Friday, Meehan apologized citing extreme exhaustion as the reason for making what he now acknowledges to be a bad call. The police chief tells the Associated Press that he didn't "mean to upset (Oakley) or his family last night." Oakley says he doesn't have much of a relationship with the police chief but has known Kusmiss for over five years.

"She's a real professional who I respect," Oakley wrote in an email. "I don't know Meehan too well, so I don't know if it was [in keeping with] his character or not." But Oakley said it was definitely not in keeping Kusmiss' character.

"She was told to come over to my house, she said. She was very apologetic."

A simple mistake brought on by exhaustion or is there something more at work? Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, suggests the latter to the Oakland Tribune. "Ordering a police officer to a journalist's home in the middle of the night to demand changes to a story is an attempt at 'censorship by intimidation,' Scheer told the Tribune. "It's a violation of the First Amendment, let's be perfectly clear."