Kevin Moore, the man who filmed police arresting Freddie Gray and dragging him on the ground was arrested on Thursday night, along with two other cop watchers from Ferguson.
“The man who recorded one of two videos showing Baltimore cops dragging a screaming Freddie Gray into the back of a police van was arrested Thursday night, two days after voicing concerns that police were trying to intimidate him by plastering his photo all over the news, saying they wanted to interview him,” reads a We CopWatch Facebook post. After the incident occurred, We CopWatch tweeted that a gun was pointed at Moore.
Shortly after his release, Moore detailed the events leading up to his arrest, in a webcast discussion with Photography Is Not a Crime’s Carlos Miller. Moore says he was protesting with Ferguson cop watchers on North Avenue, shouting obscenities and wearing an Anonymous mask. Once the group left, officers arrested them without issuing a citation or explaining what the charges were. He was released later that night.
During the webcast, Moore also said that he’s faced police intimidation since filming Gray’s arrest. Although the cop watcher handed over the video footage to the Police Department’s Office of Internal Oversight, officers allegedly told the public that he was wanted for questioning. Moore told the Baltimore Sun that officers were trying to intimidate him by circulating his photo and asking people who he was. “For the police to post that picture and say you don’t know who I am, that’s B.S. You know who I am,” he said.
“I don’t know how close I can work with these guys, if they still won’t even say how they feel. They there was something wrong there; they know it was foul play all the way around,” Moore told Miller. “They treat terrorists better than they treat us.”
Watch the video:
This isn’t the first time a person who recorded officers using excessive force was arrested. Weeks after filming the chokehold death of Eric Garner, Ramsey Orta was arrested for two counts of criminal possession of a semiautomatic handgun and trying to give the firearm to a teenager on the street. Orta denies that he was in possession of a gun when the NYPD arrested him. “When they searched me, they didn’t find nothing on me. And the same cop that searched me, he told me clearly himself, that karma’s a bitch, what goes around comes around,” he told SILive.com. “I had nothing to do with this. I would be stupid to walk around with a gun after me being in the spotlight.”