‘I was frightened’ – reporter tells of arrest by US cops
FORMER Western Mail reporter Andrew Buncombe has spoken about fearing for his life after being arrested while covering a Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle.
Mr Buncombe, who worked for the Western Mail in the 1990s and is now chief US correspondent of The Independent, told BBC Radio Wales’ Sunday Supplement programme about his ordeal.
He said: “Things went wrong very quickly. Within five or 10 minutes of my getting there I encountered a police officer standing behind a piece of police tape that said ‘do not cross.’ I walked my way towards him without crossing the tape to where he stood. I wanted to get a photograph.
“I was trying to take some pictures – he said I needed to get back. I pointed out my press badge which I had around my neck and said ‘I’m a reporter, I’m just here to get some pictures. I’m certainly not going to get in your way – I’m just here to do my job.’
“And he said, ‘you need to stand back, otherwise you’ll be arrested.’ I said ‘that’s crazy, you can’t arrest me for standing here and doing my job, doing things I’ve done a thousand times.’
“But he did, and I must say I was startled that he did arrest me.
“They knew I was a reporter, they had my badge, they had my passport. Five men arrested me – they handcuffed me, they put me in leg irons and they drove me to the police station where they told me I was going to be charged with ‘failure to disperse’. It turns out this is a regulation under Seattle city code, but in almost every circumstance journalists are exempt from it. It’s a charge I believe wasn’t applicable to me.”
Speaking about the situation where after his arrest he found himself having difficulty breathing, Mr Buncombe said: “The second of the two journeys they rehandcuffed me, they put on more leg shackles and then they put a piece of chain around my waist. This is something called a belly chain. It connects your leg shackles to your handcuffs, to give law enforcement officials greater control over a prisoner.
“I’ve seen these things before. I’ve seen them on people on death row or charged with murder, that sort of thing. You don’t think it’s going to be a journalist arrested from a park and charged with a minor misdemeanour. I said ‘are we going to Guantanamo or something?’
“I was put in this van, we were heading for the jail and as we rattled through the streets, rocked back and forth, this chain became tighter around my chest, to the extent that I couldn’t fully exhale. I was trying to keep my cool, I was trying to keep it together in this tiny enclosed space, but I literally couldn’t fully breathe properly.
“I said to these guys ‘this is bonkers’. The phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ has become in the last five or six years a really powerful phrase within the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and around the world. It was the final words that were spoken by Eric Garner.
“He was an African-American guy who died after being arrested by cops in New York in 2014 and it was also some of the very last words by George Floyd in Minneapolis, another African-American guy who was killed in police custody after his neck was knelt on by a police officer. So this phrase has all this resonance, it has all this power.
“It felt preposterous to say to these police officers ‘I can’t breathe’, but I couldn’t. He said, ‘look, we think if you can speak, we think you can breathe’.”
Mr Buncombe said he had been scared: “Gosh I was frightened. And I was so aware of my privilege – so aware of the fact that I’m a middle-aged, middle class white guy with a press badge issued by the US State Department.
“Normally I’d think this is a perch I’ve got here, and yet no one seemed to care. So I’m thinking heck, if they’re going to do this, what on earth is going to come next? Because they were oblivious, they really did not care.
“It was a tiny insight into what goes on in the American criminal justice system. I don’t think for a second what happened to me is comparable with what happens to people far less fortunate and privileged than I am.”