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IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) – An Iowa police officer who sprayed cayenne pepper and arrested a reporter who was covering an unruly Black Lives Matter protest admitted on Tuesday that he did not record the interaction on his body camera and failed to notify a supervisor as required by department policy.
Constable Luke Wilson said his body camera was on when he arrested Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri on May 31, 2020, and believed he had activated his recording feature. He said he later learned that he did not record the arrest, but did not notify a supervisor to see if the video could be retrieved after the fact, as ministry policy requires.
Wilson’s testimony came on the second day of a trial in which Sahouri and her ex-boyfriend, Spenser Robnett, are charged with non-dispersal and interfering with official acts. The accusation drew a lot of criticism media and human rights activists, who say Sahouri was doing his job as a journalist and did not commit any crime. The couple face fines and possibly even jail time if convicted.
The newspaper had tasked Sahouri with covering the protest calling for racial justice at the Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines, days after the death of George Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis who was pronounced dead after a white officer gave him put the knee on the neck for nine minutes. . Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the mall and Sahouri was reporting the details live on Twitter.
Wilson, an 18-year-old veteran of the Des Moines Police Department, said he responded to the protest and found an “emotional crowd” smashing store windows, throwing stones and water bottles at them. officers and was running in different directions. He said his unit was ordered to clean a commercial parking lot and that he used a device known as a fogger to cover the area with clouds of pepper spray.
He said the chemical irritants helped force most of the crowd to disperse, including Robnett, but decided Sahouri should be arrested when she was not gone. Wilson said he didn’t know Sahouri, whose eyes were watery and his nose was running in the spray, was a journalist.
Wilson said he grabbed it with his left hand while his fogger was still in his right hand. Wilson said Robnett came back and tried to pull Sahouri out of his grip, and Wilson said he deployed more pepper spray which “incapacitated” Robnett.
In cross-examination by defense attorney Nicholas Klinefeldt, Wilson said he accused Sahouri of interference because she briefly spread her left arm while he was arresting her. He admitted, however, that he did not mention this allegation in his police report on the arrest.
Wilson said he rarely used his body camera during his normal job at the city airport, mistakenly believed he recorded Sahouri’s arrest and was unaware of the details of camera policy body of the department.
The cameras still capture video when turned on and can retrieve video from incidents that were not subsequently recorded if they have not yet been erased. Agents who fail to record incidents they should have should notify supervisors, who can then attempt to retrieve video without audio. It was immediately clear that Sahouri’s arrest was newsworthy and controversial.
Prosecutors say Sahouri and Robnett ignored police orders to leave the area long before their arrest, while defense contends such orders were unclear.
Body camera video released in court showed officers shouting at protesters to get out of an intersection and ordering them to be peaceful about 90 minutes before their arrest, and Robnett and Sahouri complied.
A distinct order to disperse could be heard faintly in the background video – so quiet that even an officer testifying for the prosecution seemed to have trouble understanding it. But prosecutors argued the message was louder at the scene and broadcast through a public address system.
Wilson, however, said he did not initially accuse Robnett of not dispersing because he left after being hit with pepper spray.
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