Reporters covering Ferguson unrest last year are charged with failing to quickly leave McDonald's
Two reporters arrested at a McDonald’s last year while covering the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, have learned they are being charged in the incident.
Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post have been issued summonses to appear in court on charges of trespassing and interfering with a police officer, report the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The trespassing charge against Lowery claims he remained on private property despite being asked to leave, and he interfered with the police officer’s duties because he didn’t comply with “repeated commands to immediately exit” the restaurant. Reilly hadn’t received his summons on Monday, but a spokesman for St. Louis County confirmed a summons had been sent.
Lowery wrote about the incident last year, which occurred as he was charging his cellphone at a McDonald’s used as a staging area by reporters. Lowery said police asked him for identification; ordered him to stop recording video; then told him to leave and slammed him into a soda machine while cuffing him.
Lowery was allowed to continue recording after he protested the order to shut it down. The video shows an officer showing impatience as he repeatedly orders Lowery to leave. Lowery says he was gathering his belongings and was heading to the door, when one officer told him to exit left and another told him to go another way.
Lowery said officers grabbed him when his backpack began to slip off shoulder. “OK, let’s take him,” one of the officers reportedly said.
The Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim, and the publication’s senior politics editor, Sam Stein, issued a statement on the arrests. “A crime was committed at the McDonald’s, not by journalists, but by local police who assaulted both Ryan and Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post during violent arrests,” they said. “If Wesley Lowery and Ryan J. Reilly can be charged like this with the whole country watching, just imagine what happens when nobody is.”
Washington Post executive editor Marton Baron also issued a statement. “Charging a reporter with trespassing and interfering with a police officer when he was just doing his job is outrageous,” he said. “Wes Lowery should never have been arrested in the first place. That was an abuse of police authority.”
