In a recent Daily News column, Jimmy Breslin detailed the extraordinary Thanksgiving Day rescue by New York City firefighters of a youngster who they pulled, lifeless, from a flaming Park Slope building and whose heart and lungs they miraculously re-started once the boy was safely away from the deadly smoke and flames.

Photojournalist Joe Marino is also mentioned in Breslin's story because of a picture he took during the drama that later made the front page of the New York Daily News and that perfectly summarizes the selfless, heroic work that is FDNY's stock-in-trade.

What's also mentioned in the column is that Marino was impeded in his work by a police department sergeant who, Breslin reported, pushed Marino away from the scene and yanked off and confiscated Marino's NYPD-issued working press credential. "During this melee," wrote Breslin, "out of sheer workingman’s habit, [Marino] kept shooting."

The sergeant's reported attempts to block Marino from the scene and the confiscation of his press pass came just one day after NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly issued instructions to all members of the department not to interfere unreasonably with reporters who are doing their jobs. The instructions were issued in response to an avalanche of criticism of NYPD's suppression, abuse and arrests of reporters during the November 15th purge from Zuccotti Park of "Occupy Wall Street" protesters.

In a letter to DCPI Paul Browne and at a subsequent meeting with department brass, news organizations, including the Daily News, detailed instances of NYPD assaults on reporters during the raid and decried the arrests of journalists who were attempting that day to perform their constitutionally protected work.

In the wake of November 15th, the New York Press Club won the support of other organizations representing individual journalists to form a coalition to monitor police actions against the press.

The unseemly tirade in Park Slope by the NYPD sergeant appears to be the first indication that Commissioner Kelly's instructions have not reached all members of the department. Whether the sergeant who was "guarding" the scene from the press didn't get Kelly's memo - or chose to ignore it - is a departmental matter that we urge the commissioner to quickly address.

Read Jimmy Breslin's Daily News column for more about the heroic actions that day by members of FDNY's Rescue 2, Ladders 105, 122, Engine 239 and Squad 1. A detailed accounting for buffs can be found on the Rescue 2 website.