Police staged a “chilling” and unprecedented raid on a Kansas newspaper, seizing computers, cellphones, and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, reporters, and even the publisher’s home amid a dispute with a local businesswoman.

A reporter’s finger was injured when a cop grabbed her cell phone out of her hand.

The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” in the Friday raid, the newspaper’s owner and publisher, Eric Meyer told the Kansas Reflector.

Meyer said the police took action because a confidential source leaked sensitive information about a local restaurant owner, who allegedly took offense.

Meyer said the message to his newspaper was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”

The raid came after news reports about the Marion restaurant owner, Kari Newell, who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner.

The stories included revelations about her apparent lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving, the Reflector reported.

Meyer spent 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal and 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois and said he’d never heard of the police raiding a newspaper.

“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”

The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, seems to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists, the Kansas Reflector reported.

The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead.

Meyer reported last week that Newell had kicked newspaper staff out of a public forum with LaTurner.

Newell hit back on her personal Facebook page.

A confidential source contacted the newspaper, Meyer said and provided evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to use her vehicle without a driver’s license.

The criminal record could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license for her catering business.

A reporter with the Marion Record used a state website to verify the information provided by the source.

But Meyer suspected the source was relaying information from Newell’s husband, who had filed for divorce.

Meyer decided not to publish a story about the arrest, and he alerted the police to the situation.

“We thought we were being set up,” Meyer said.

Police notified Newell, who then complained at a city council meeting that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which isn’t true.

Her public comments prompted the newspaper to set the record straight in a story published Thursday.

The next morning, cops showed up simultaneously at Meyer’s home and the newspaper office.

They presented a search warrant that alleges identity theft and unlawful use of a computer.

The search warrant identifies two pages worth of items that law enforcement officers were allowed to seize, including computer software and hardware, digital communications, cellular networks, servers, and hard drives, items with passwords, utility records, and all documents and records pertaining to Newell.

The warrant specifically targeted ownership of computers capable of being used to “participate in the identity theft of Kari Newell.”

Newell, writing Friday under a changed name on her personal Facebook account, said she “foolishly” received a DUI in 2008 and “knowingly operated a vehicle without a license out of necessity,” the Reflector reported.

“Journalists have become the dirty politicians of today, twisting narrative for bias agendas, full of muddied half-truths,” Newell wrote. “We rarely get facts that aren’t baited with misleading insinuations.”