While the newspaper has questioned Cody’s motives, the body camera video shows him repeatedly telling newspaper staffers that he is investigating how it and Herbel obtained information about the owner of two local restaurants, Kari Newell. Meyer blames the stress of the raids for the death the next day of his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, the paper’s co-owner. “I’m glad we’re rid of him,” Herbel said. She said last month that she feared for her safety. Herbel has called the search of her home illegal because of differences in the texts of the affidavit Cody used to get the warrant and the warrant itself. Some believe it violated a Kansas law that makes it more difficult to force reporters and editors to disclose their sources and unpublished material. Some legal experts believe the raids on the Record’s office and Meyer’s home violated a federal privacy law that protects journalists from having their newsrooms searched. “This was all about finding out who our sources were,” Bernie Rhodes, the newspaper’s attorney, said Monday. But the newspaper and its attorney have suggested he might have been trying to find out what it had learned about his past as a police captain in Kansas City, Missouri. He’s briefly seen bending over, apparently to look at the drawer, before the other officer’s clipboard blocks the view of what the chief is doing.Ĭody obtained warrants for the three raids by telling a judge that he had evidence of possible identity theft and other potential crimes tied to the circulation of information about a local restaurant owner’s driving record. The AP obtained the body camera video Monday through an open records request.Ĭody then says, “Keep a personal file on me. Recently obtained body camera video from the search of the newspaper shows that after an officer rifled through a desk drawer of the reporter looking into Cody’s background, he beckoned Cody over to look at the documents he’d found. “It kind of leads you to believe that there’s some smoking gun somewhere that everybody knows about and we’re going to try to get ahead of it.” You know, we had to wait more than six weeks to get him suspended,” said Eric Meyer, the Record’s editor and publisher. His resignation initially was reported by the Marion County Record and the Wichita Eagle. Cody faces one federal lawsuit, and others are expected.Ĭody did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment about his resignation. The search of the newspaper put Marion, a town of 1,900 residents some 150 miles (240 kilometers) southwest of Kansas City, at the center of a fierce national debate over press freedoms and cast an international spotlight on Cody and his tactics. In a text message Monday night to the AP, he said he couldn’t answer questions about the chief’s resignation “as it is a personnel matter.”Ĭody stepped down weeks after a local prosecutor said that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to justify the search of the Marion County Record or searches at the same time of the publisher’s home and Herbel’s home. Mayfield had suspended Cody on Thursday for reasons that have not been made public. Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody’s resignation was confirmed to The Associated Press both by Mayor Dave Mayfield and City Council member Ruth Herbel, following an announcement by Mayfield at Monday’s council meeting. (AP) - The police chief who led an August raid on a small weekly newspaper in central Kansas resigned Monday, just days after he was suspended from his post and following the release of body camera video of the raid showing an officer searching the desk of a reporter investigating the chief’s past. Business & Finance Click to expand menu.
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