The Detroit Police Department has opened an investigation into the arrest of a Detroit Free-Press photographer by a plainclothes officer during an arrest on a public street.
Mandi Wright was filming an arrest, when an officer ordered her to stop filming and wrestled her phone away from her. The Internal Affairs investigation is also looking into the disappearance of a memory card from her newspaper-issued iPhone and whether she was briefly left alone with the suspect she was filming.
Wright filmed the arrest of a man wearing a white tank top and blue jeans on Thursday in an area east of downtown. In her video footage, eight officers arresting the man are in plainclothes, most with "Police" visible on their clothing or external vests.
A plainclothes officer with no markings then confronts Wright and tells her to "turn it off." She identifies herself as a journalist and the officer responds by saying, "I don't care who you are." The camera is then jostled and the recording cuts off.