Washington Post reporters briefly arrested during unrest outside Capitol

Reporters from The Washington Post were briefly arrested during the unrest outside of the Capitol Wednesday night as police detained people for breaking Washington, D.C.’s 6 p.m. curfew.

The Post’s Zoeann Murphy said D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detained her and another video journalist, Whitney Leaming, while on air with The Washington Post Live, which showed Leaming’s live camera footage at about 7:45 p.m. 

“We were filming the line of police and the protesters facing the line of police and were then kettled by the police and are now in line to put on — I think it looks like some vans — in the process of being arrested,” Murphy said during the broadcast. 

“They haven’t told us that we’ve done anything,” she added. “We have told them that we’re journalists. They’ve just taken us — there’s like one officer to each person, and they have just pulled us aside. I’ve asked them a couple of times if we’re being arrested and they have confirmed that.”

With @wleaming, still rolling the camera while we were being arrested for filming protests outside the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/PcEiwz28DU

— Zoeann Murphy (@ZoeannMurphy) January 6, 2021

About a minute and a half into the stream, a police officer can be heard saying, “Hey, Saul, you want to let the press go? Alright.”

Murphy then said, “They’ve just told us that they’re letting the press go and have told us we can go” once police examined their press badges.

The reporting duo said they would stay to watch the other arrests, noting that police were arresting people for breaking curfew.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) ordered a 6 p.m. curfew Wednesday afternoon after President Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building shortly after 2 p.m. In her announcement, the mayor clarified that the curfew scheduled to last until 6 a.m. did not apply to “essential workers, including working media with their outlet-issued credentials.”

MPD announced that as of Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. police made 52 arrests including four for carrying pistols without a license and one for possession of a prohibited weapon. Twenty-six of the 52 arrests were made on Capitol grounds, MPD Chief Robert Contee said.