EDITOR’S NOTE: The following editorial was first published by North of Boston Media Group.

It’s the stuff of a totalitarian regime: Police raided the offices and the home of the publisher of a small-town newspaper known for holding public officials accountable.

Backed by a specious search warrant from a friendly judge, they grabbed all they could get their hands on – computers, paper files, reporters’ cell phones. Everything. The raid was so aggressive, intrusive and personal that it likely contributed to the death of the publisher’s 98-year-old mother, who answered her door Friday before last to find armed police outside, police who also took her personal computer and smart devices.

What was the reason for the raid? Well, that’s a secret, according to the town’s police chief.

This stunning display of authoritarianism didn’t happen in some brutal dictatorship in another part of the world. It happened here, in America’s heartland, in Marion County, Kansas.

And it violates the First Amendment so clearly and aggressively that it boggles the mind.

“There’s a lot of healthy tension between the government and newspapers, but this?” Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association, told the New York Times. “This is not right, this is wrong. This cannot be allowed to stand.”

The raid on the offices of the 4,000-circulation Marion County Register and the home of publisher Eric Meyer and his mother, Joan, is likely linked to the most basic of community newspaper stories: the application for a liquor license. That application was caught up in a messy divorce between the applicant and her spouse, who may have leaked damaging information about a drunk-driving arrest to the newspaper.

The newspaper didn’t act on the information but that didn’t stop the police chief from deciding the information was “illegally acquired” and sending his entire department on a raid.

This raid wasn’t about the law. It was about silencing critics. And it’s happening more frequently across the country.

In recent years, for example, governments have canceled contracts for publishing public notices in local newspapers after those papers published articles critical of elected officials. And earlier this summer, three New Hampshire men were charged with harassing and attempting to intimidate two New Hampshire Public Radio journalists who were investigating sexual allegations and other misconduct against the former owner of the drug abuse treatment center.

The attacks are coming at a challenging time for local journalism, as a steady decline in the number of small and mid-sized newspapers has left large parts of the country with a “news desert,” where there is little to no oversight of local government. Without watchdog journalism, public officials are rarely held to account.

And that may be close to the real story in Marion, where the newspaper has been investigating sexual misconduct allegations against Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody lodged at his previous position in Kansas City, Missouri, from which he retired.

All of the paper’s information from that investigation was on the computers and servers that Cody seized in Friday’s raid.

Meyer said he’s planning to file a federal lawsuit in response to the raid and he’s on rock-solid ground in doing so. It’s right there in the Bill of Rights:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

An attack on press freedoms anywhere is an attack on press freedoms everywhere.