Democratic National Convention coverage
Brown Palace Hotel officials claim that the ABC news crew was blocking the entrance to the hotel, making it impossible for guests to enter or leave, which is why police ended up making an arrest.
They insist that police asked the reporters to step aside, even informing them that they had every right to stand on a public sidewalk, but the reporters insisted on standing in the doorway, which gave police no option but to arrest ABC producer Asa Eslocker.
It doesn’t sound much different than the way Miami police accused me of standing in the middle of a busy intersection, refusing to leave, which is why they had no choice but to arrest me.
I wasn’t standing in the middle of the street and I doubt the ABC news crew was blocking the entrance.
The comments came from Brown Palace Hotel public relations manager Shannon Dexheimer, who was responding to an email from one of my readers, who then forwarded the email to me.
The exact interchange is below, starting with the email that my reader sent to the hotel’s marketing department.
I will be alerting as many people as possible to ask them avoid staying at your hotel at all costs.
To use the police to have a photographer who was on public property arrested shows just how un-American you people are.
You deserve nothing but contempt.
This is Dexheimer’s response.
We have worked with hundreds of journalists with no issues. The ABC news cameras were intruding on the entrance of the hotel, creating an unsafe entrance/exit for our guests, which are our priority at all times. The police department asked them to move to the side several times so that our guests could enter/exit, and ABC refused. ABC was clearly told that they could stand on the sidewalk but it is illegal to block an entrance to any business, which is what they were doing. After not complying with the police requests, they were then asked to move to the other side of the street. It is our understanding that ABC continued to speak belligerently to the police and were arrested for not complying with police orders. The arrest resulted from issues between the police and ABC, not The Brown Palace Hotel.
