Police arrested three photographers who were covering a white supremacist demonstration and counter-demonstration in Toledo, Ohio, on Saturday.
The photographers say they were arrested without warning, held for several hours along with the handful of demonstrators who were arrested, charged and released. One of the photographers says when police returned his camera, the memory card had been either damaged or erased and he lost all his images.
The three photographers arrested were Jeffrey Sauger, a freelancer from Michigan working for the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA), Jim West, a freelancer from Michigan working for the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Jeffrey Willis, a graphic designer and photographer at The Toledo Journal, a local African-American newspaper.
Sauger was charged with criminal trespass, West with failure to disperse, and Willis with disorderly conduct, the photographers say. A Toledo Police Department spokesperson says authorities instructed journalists not to stray from a particular area, and police arrested photographers who did.
Police presence was high at the rally, which drew about 60 neo-Nazis and about 200 counter-protesters to the steps of a government building in Toledo, according to an Associated Press report.
Nerves were especially tense since the last time the National Socialist Movement attempted to hold a rally in Toledo, in October, the scene erupted into a riot.
This time, the demonstrations were peaceful, say the photographers. Police on horseback attempted to keep the two groups of demonstrators confined to different areas, and also had an area set up for news media.
"The police started pretty aggressively riding their horses up and down in front of the protesters," West says, adding that the crowd was noisy and waving signs to protest the Nazis. "Some of the horses were really pretty spooked by it."
Willis was the first photographer arrested, at about 1:30 p.m.
He was standing next to another reporter in the protest area when a police officer asked him to come over. "I thought he was going to ask me to do something like take a picture for him," Willis says. The next thing he knew, he was being led away under arrest.
Willis says he obtained the press credential police handed out to journalists covering the rally, and spent part of the rally in the media area and part of it in the area with the demonstrators.
Willis, who has worked for the Journal for three years and covered the rioting in October, says he's never been arrested before. Willis is black; the other two arrested photographers are white.
Police took Willis's possessions after he was arrested, and handed them back when he was released. But when he tried to view the images on his camera, a Nikon D70S, he got an error message. Willis says police wrapped his camera in a wet coat, which may have damaged the memory card. He still has hope that the images may be recoverable, but as of Monday the card still wasn't working. "I do know that there were photos on there before," he says.
A short time after Willis's arrest, police arrested West in about the same area.
West, who did not have a press pass for the event, was near the police barricade shooting pictures of a horse that was acting out of line, he says. He was arrested by an officer who "didn't say a word, just grabbed me," West says.
West says he has covered rallies and labor disputes before and has never been arrested for anything similar.
"The media is almost always given just a little more leeway than the general public," he says. "To get the good picture, sometimes you need to push the envelope. I didn't really do that in this situation. I didn't need to."
Sauger was arrested in the media area at about 3 p.m., about ten minutes after the Nazis began speaking. Sauger says he didn't get a media pass because officials told him he was too late for anyone to issue him one, but decided to shoot in the media area anyway since none of the officers he spoke to seemed to mind.
While he was lining up a shot, a plainclothes police officer tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to come with him, Sauger says. Officers handcuffed him and charged him with trespass for being in the media area without a proper credential.
"He got there too late to get the rinky-dink local press credential they give out and was told by several people he could go ahead and work," says Sauger's editor, EPA staff photographer Tannen Maury in Chicago. "EPA's position on this is we're going to back him up on this as far as we can," including paying Sauger a day rate for traveling to his court appearance, Maury says.
It was Sauger's first assignment for EPA. He's been a news photographer since 1989 and traveled to Iraq in 2003.
All three photographers were released within a few hours and asked to come back Monday for a court appearance. Sauger and West pleaded not guilty; Willis says his lawyer would try to set a different court date.
The photographers say they are amazed that they got arrested, and question the tactics police used.
"They were walking horses through the crowd and just knocking people around with their horses," says Sauger. "This guy rode his horse's throat right up on my head."
Toledo police spokesperson Cap. Diana Ruiz-Krause says she was at the scene Saturday and "The horses looked very much under control."
Ruiz-Krause says police recommended that journalists stay within the media observation areas, and her understanding is that the photographers who were arrested crossed a line drawn by the police. "I could see several media people in the general viewing area who didn't get arrested," she says.
