IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) – An Iowa journalist who is campaigning for racial justice has been temporarily blinded after a police officer shot pepper spray at her and then sent her to jail, although he repeatedly said she only did her job. do, according to the video released Tuesday at the reporter’s hearing.
Body camera video captured by Des Moines Police Sgt. Natale Chiodo detained Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri on May 31, 2020, and her eyes were burning from pepper spray. She said she was at the newspaper and asked Officer Luke Wilson why he was arresting her, adding that she was in pain and could not see.
“This is my job,” Sahouri says on the video. “I’m just doing my job. I’m a journalist. ”
The Sahouri defense played the video for jurors on the second day of a trial in which Sahouri and her ex-boyfriend, Spenser Robnett, are accused of failing to distribute them and interfere with official acts. The prosecution has been widely criticized of media and human rights advocates, who say the charges are an attack on press freedom. The couple are being fined and possibly even jailed if convicted.
Officer Wilson testified that he did not record the arrest on his body camera and did not notify a supervisor as required by the department’s policy. But Chiodo’s body camera captured the scene shortly after Wilson Sahouri detained.
Chiodo said he did not arrest a second Register reporter with Sahouri, Katie Akin, because she did not obey orders and “looked very scared” and told her to go instead.
Akin testified that she was surprised to see an officer spray pepper spray and arrest Sahouri because “I do not understand that we are breaking laws or doing something wrong.” Akin said she started yelling at the police that they were journalists and showing a peach sign.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation calls the video powerful evidence that Sahouri was ‘arrested while doing her job of reporting on historic protests’.
“This arrest should never have been carried out and the prosecutor should never have had to bring these charges,” the group said in a tweet.
Des Moines Register executive editor Carol Hunter testified that the newspaper commissioned Sahouri to cover the protest in Merle Hay Mall days after the death of George Floyd, a man from Black Minneapolis, who was pronounced dead after a white officer put his knee on his neck for about nine. minute. Hunter said Sahouri did her job “very well” that evening and reported observations and images of the event live on Twitter.
Hunter said Sahouri was not violating the newspaper policy by allowing her boyfriend to join the event, which she said makes sense as it is a dangerous situation. She said the newspaper did not issue any formal credentials to Sahouri, and that employees at that time only had security badges, which were optional to wear. Authorities said Sahouri did not carry press statements.
Wilson, an 18-year-old veteran of the Des Moines police station, said he was responding to the protest and found a “riotous crowd” breaking shop windows, throwing stones and water bottles at officers and running in different directions. He said his unit was told to clean a parking lot, and he used a fogger device to cover the area with clouds of pepper spray.
He said the chemical irritants had to force most of the crowd to disperse, including Robnett, but that he decided Sahouri should be arrested if she did not leave. Wilson said he was unaware that Sahouri was a journalist.
Wilson said he grabbed her with his left hand while his washer was in his right hand. Wilson said Robnett returned and tried to pull Sahouri out of his grasp, and Wilson said he used more pepper spray which made Robnett “unfit”.
Sahouri was jailed in a police van and released hours later.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Nicholas Klinefeldt, Wilson said he charged Sahouri with interference because she briefly pulled her left arm away while arresting her. He admitted that he did not mention the claim in his police report on the arrest.
Wilson said he only rarely used his body camera during his normal work at the city airport, mistakenly believed he had recorded Sahouri’s arrest and did not know the details of the department’s body camera policy.
The cameras always record videos when they are on, and can record videos of incidents that were not recorded afterwards if they have not been deleted. Officers who do not record incidents should notify supervisors, who can then try to repair videos that do not have audio.
Prosecutors say Sahouri and Robnett ignored a police order to leave the area that was broadcast about 90 minutes before their arrest over a public address system.
The defense argues that the order was only intended to clear an intersection where protesters were blocking a group car. Akin, the reporter for Register who was not arrested, testified that she did not have the impression that she had left and continued with her reporting.
On camera played in court, officers shouted at protesters to get out of the intersection and instructed them to be peaceful. Robnett and Sahouri comply.
A separate distribution order could faintly be heard on the video in the background – so quiet that even an officer testifying for the prosecution struggles to make it out. Prosecutors argued that the message was louder at the scene.