IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) – An Iowa police officer who spread pepper spray and arrested a journalist who was covering an undisciplined protest by Black Lives Matter acknowledged on Tuesday that he did not record the interaction on his body camera and did not notify a supervisor as required by department policy.
Officer Luke Wilson said his body camera was on when he arrested Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri on May 31, 2020, and that he believed he had activated the recording function. He said he later learned that he did not register the arrest, but did not notify a supervisor to see if the video could be recovered after the fact, as required by department policy.
Wilson’s testimony came on the second day of a trial in which Sahouri and her ex-boyfriend, Spenser Robnett, are accused of failure to disperse and interfere in official acts. The accusation drew widespread criticism media and human rights defenders, who say Sahouri was doing his job as a journalist and did not commit any crime. Both face fines and potentially even a prison sentence if convicted.
The newspaper designated Sahouri to cover the protest asking 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 put his knee on his neck for nine minutes. . Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the mall, and Sahouri was reporting the details live on Twitter.
Wilson, an 18-year veteran of the Des Moines Police Department, said he responded to the protest and found a “tumultuous mob” that was breaking shop windows, throwing stones and water bottles at police officers and running in different directions. He said his unit was instructed to clean a commercial parking lot and he used a device known as a nebulizer to cover the area with clouds of pepper spray.
He said the irritating chemists worked to force most of the crowd to disperse, including Robnett, but decided that Sahouri needed to be arrested when he did not leave. Wilson said he did not know that Sahouri, whose eyes watered and his nose ran because of the spray, was a journalist.
Wilson said he grabbed it with his left hand while the nebulizer was still in his right hand. Wilson said Robnett came back and tried to get Sahouri out of his reach, and Wilson said he implanted more pepper spray than “incapacitated” Robnett.
Under interrogation by defense lawyer Nicholas Klinefeldt, Wilson said he accused Sahouri of interference because she briefly pulled his left arm while he was arresting her. He acknowledged, however, that he did not mention this statement in his police report on the arrest.
Wilson said he rarely used his body camera during his normal work at the city airport, mistakenly believed that she had recorded Sahouri’s arrest and was not familiar with the details of the department’s body camera policy.
Cameras are always capturing video when activated and can retrieve videos of incidents that were not recorded later, if they have not yet been deleted. Law enforcement officers who do not record the incidents they should have are required to notify supervisors, who can then try to retrieve the video that has no audio. It was immediately clear that Sahouri’s prison was interesting and controversial.
Prosecutors say Sahouri and Robnett ignored police orders to leave the area long before their arrests, while the defense argues that such orders were unclear.
The video of the body camera displayed in court showed police officers shouting at protesters to get out of an intersection and instructing them to be silent about 90 minutes before their arrests, and Robnett and Sahouri did as they were told.
A separate order to disperse could be heard faintly in the background video – so silent that even a policeman testifying on the charge seemed to have a hard time deciphering it. But prosecutors argued that the message was loudest on the spot and transmitted through a public sound system.
Wilson, however, said he initially did not accuse Robnett of not dispersing because he left when he was hit by pepper spray.