A journalist will face trial in Iowa on Monday on charges arising from her arrest while covering a Black Lives Matter protest last year, in a case condemned by Amnesty International and news organizations across the US as an assault on press freedom.
Andrea Sahouri, a public safety reporter for the Des Moines Register, is charged with “failure to disperse and interference with official acts, misdemeanors”. If convicted, she could face a fine and 30 days in jail. She has pleaded not guilty.
Sahouri was arrested at the protest in Des Moines on 31 May, six days after the killing of George Floyd by officers in Minneapolis, which touched off months of international protests against police brutality and for racial justice.
She says she identified herself as a member of the press several times. But police pepper-sprayed and zip-tied her and her then boyfriend. Both were taken to Polk county jail.
A Des Moines police officer, Luke Wilson, has said he believed Sahouri was a protester because she was not wearing press credentials. Because Wilson did not turn on his body camera as he was supposed to, there is no video footage of the incident.
Sahouri did film herself recounting what happened, while detained in a police car.
The judge in the case, Lawrence McLellan, has declined to drop the charges but has ordered police to give body camera training materials to Sahouri’s defense team.
Sahouri was one of many journalists targeted by police amid the wave of protests that followed the killing of Floyd. The trial of the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck, Derek Chauvin, is scheduled to begin on Monday.
The CNN journalist Omar Jimenez, and his crew were arrested live on camera while covering a protest in Minneapolis. The NBC journalist Ali Velshi was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet, also live on camera. Donald Trump called what happened to Velshi “the most beautiful thing”.
According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, 127 journalists were arrested or detained in 2020, compared with nine arrested or detained in 2019. Sahouri is one of 13 to face criminal charges.
The Des Moines Register has expressed support for its reporter.
“It’s frightening that so many arrests and detainments have happened in a country that considers itself a beacon of press freedom,” it said in an editorial. “There’s disturbing evidence in some cases that police targeted those arrested because they were journalists.”
The Register’s editor, Carol Hunter, told USA Today: “Freedom of the press rests on news-gathering. This really is an attack on a fundamental part of being able to bring people the news.”
Amnesty International urged the Polk county attorney, John Sarcone, to “immediately drop the spurious criminal charges against Des Moines Register journalist … who was arrested simply for doing her job as a reporter.”