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Oklahoma state Rep. Dean Davis (R) insisted that officers didn’t have the power to arrest him outside an Oklahoma City bar just after 2 a.m. Thursday. Arguing with a police sergeant, Davis pointed to a section of the state constitution that renders lawmakers “privileged from arrest during the session of the Legislature.”
“You can’t detain me,” he said in body-camera footage released to The Washington Post by the Oklahoma City Police Department.
“I can, and I am right now,” Sgt. Timothy Brewer told him.
Davis, 50, was charged with public drunkenness, a misdemeanor. That afternoon, while on the floor of the House of Representatives at the state Capitol, Davis insisted he had done nothing wrong while nevertheless apologizing to fellow lawmakers for “creating this unnecessary distraction from the important work of the House.”
Davis didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) addressed the incident Friday at his weekly news conference.
“People sometimes make poor choices and … they need to be held accountable,” he said, according to KFOR. “So [I] don’t know any specifics about that. But, you know, we’re going to be a law-and-order state in Oklahoma, and we hold ourselves to higher standards, especially as public officials.”
Brewer and Lt. Jeff Cooper were driving to a police station around 2:10 a.m. to wrap up their shift when they spotted people hanging out at a bar called Skinny Slim’s, according to an incident report written by Brewer. Because it is illegal for people to drink on the patio after 2, Brewer and Cooper approached the group and told them to leave.
Three men, including Davis, did not obey, Brewer said in his report.
Instead, Davis allegedly started arguing with the officers. Police asked him twice more to put down his drink and leave or go to jail, Brewer wrote. Although he eventually set down the drink, Davis then told police something to the effect of “you don’t know how bad you messed up [but] you will find out tomorrow,” the report states.
Brewer told him to put his hands behind his back, according to the report, as Davis repeatedly told one of the other men in the group, “Are you getting this?”
Brewer handcuffed Davis and marched him to a police cruiser, where he eventually guided Davis to the back seat. Once there, Davis told Brewer to pull out a card from his wallet, which police had confiscated.
“Read the back of that card,” Davis said. “Read what the state law says.”
The sergeant did. On the card was a version of the Oklahoma Constitution’s Article V, Section 22: “Senators and Representatives shall, except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during the session of the Legislature, and in going to and returning from the same, and, for any speech or debate in either House, shall not be questioned in any other place.”
Because the first day of the legislative session was Feb. 6, Davis argued that officers were prohibited from arresting him. That was not Brewer’s interpretation. After reading the card aloud, he told Davis that because he wasn’t at the Capitol actively engaged in his role as lawmaker at that moment, the section didn’t apply.
“Fine. Call your adviser. Call everyone,” Davis said in the body-camera footage.
During the subsequent ride in the cruiser, Davis kept arguing, the body-cam footage shows. The lawmaker said he was trying to obey commands and de-escalate the initial encounter, which was not captured on camera.
“I think you guys came here for an argument or an instigation, because you guys rolled up pretty hot,” Davis said while handcuffed in the back seat.
Before arresting Davis, Brewer did not do any field sobriety tests or test his blood alcohol content to determine that he was drunk, something the lawmaker pointed out on the drive to jail. Davis questioned how Brewer was arresting him on suspicion of being drunk in public without performing any tests and claimed he hadn’t been drinking alcohol outside the bar, just Coca-Cola. Brewer told him that, after 18 years of police work, he could tell when someone was drunk. Davis had been slurring his words, smelled of alcohol and struggled to obey commands, the sergeant added.
Fellow state Rep. T.J. Marti (R) was part of the group hanging out on the Skinny Slim’s patio when police pulled up. Marti didn’t respond to a request for comment, but in an interview with NonDoc, a nonprofit news site in Oklahoma, he challenged the police account of what happened, including the claim that Davis tried to wriggle out of the situation by identifying himself as a state lawmaker.
“He didn’t flash his ID at them. He was actually ordering an Uber and attempting to walk away from them when he was arrested,” Marti told the news organization. “They didn’t show the first 30 seconds of the video where they jump out of their cars screaming at everybody.”
Marti also said Davis had been drinking Dr Pepper while they were outside the bar, not booze.
Thursday was the second time Davis has been arrested in an incident involving alcohol since he was first elected in 2018, court records show. He was put on probation last year after pleading no contest to driving while being impaired, speeding and obstructing a police officer in a 2019 case.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/03/27/oklahoma-dean-davis-arrest/