City Councilwoman Sandra Reid, left, and Council President Wanda Williams.
Video footage taken at the State Street gas station where Harrisburg City Councilwoman Sandra Reid was arrested two days before Thanksgiving is among the evidence the district attorney’s office is using to determine whether to file charges, First Assistant District Attorney Fran Chardo confirmed Wednesday.
The footage includes video from both police dashboard cameras and store surveillance cameras, Chardo said.
The store’s footage, from cameras with views inside and outside City Gas & Diesel at 15th and State streets, was collected by law enforcement the day after Reid’s arrest, according to Nirmal Singh Gill, a man who identified himself as the business owner.
Gill said he was not present during the arrest and had not viewed the surveillance footage. He did not make available any employees who might have witnessed the incident at his store.
So far, few details have surfaced of the circumstances leading to the arrest of Reid, a first-term councilwoman with an often fiery demeanor who has actively campaigned to remove trash from city streets and crack down on illegal dumpers.
Since her arrest, late in the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 25, Harrisburg police have referred questions about the incident to the mayor’s office. Reid, meanwhile, has declined to give her version of events, saying she would wait to release a statement until after the district attorney had made a decision on the charges.
Most of what is known about the incident comes from a police log, available for download on the city’s website. The log records the arrest of two people close to midnight, one of them a 29-year-old black male and the other Councilwoman Reid.
The log is generated automatically from details entered by officers at the time of an arrest, said Paula Trovy, the police department’s public information officer. In the log, Reid is identified as Sandra Greene, a name from a previous marriage. Both Trovy and Chardo said that was consistent with the police records system, which logs subjects by the name under which they are first entered into the database.
According to the log, Reid was arrested for obstruction of justice, which Chardo said took place during the arrest of the other suspect. The man was arrested for making threats, physical harassment and false imprisonment, as well as for remaining on private property in defiance of an order to leave, the log says.
Officials have “no reason to believe” Reid and the man knew each other, Chardo said, but he added that he couldn’t be sure.
The counts against the man could be charged as three misdemeanors and one summary offense, Chardo said, while the count against Reid could be charged as a misdemeanor. As of midday Wednesday, no charges against either had been filed.
On Wednesday, the city denied a right-to-know request for the surveillance tapes, citing an exemption in the law for materials involved in either a criminal or noncriminal investigation.
Chardo later affirmed the exemption, saying the tapes formed part of the investigation. He did not say whether his office would release the tapes on its own, and referred to a law that restricts dissemination of investigatory materials to non-law enforcement entities.
He did say, however, that the tapes would likely be an exhibit in any case resulting from the investigation, at which point they would become public documents.
This story has been updated with information that an alternate surname identifying Councilwoman Reid was from a previous marriage, and to clarify a point about the names recorded in Harrisburg police logs.
