US police drew guns at a Black real estate agent who was showing a house to his client and his teenage son, also Black, after receiving a complaint from a neighbour who wrongly accused them of breaking and entering.
Eric Brown was giving a tour of the house to Roy Thorne and his 15-year-old son Samuel in a suburb in Wyoming, Michigan, on 1 August when he saw a police officer circling the property with his gun drawn.
At first, he thought there was a fugitive in the yard and feared Mr Thorne may not buy the house, reported NBC News. But his concerns about selling the house soon faded, with personal safety taking precedence after he saw another officer “behind a tree making hand gestures.”
Soon, the police ordered the three to step out of the house with their hands in the air, according to footage released by the police from the dashboard camera in one of the officer’s vehicles. All three of them can be seen in the footage stepping out of the house one by one, following the officer’s orders.
Police then handcuffed them and put them in the back seats of separate patrol vehicles. Mr Brown was about to be put in a cruiser when he urged a police officer to pull out his wallet from a pocket and find his business card that identified him as a real estate agent, reported NBC News.
“I’m just showing the house,” he told the officer. It was then that the officer paused and asked the handcuffed real-estate agent how he got in the house.
Though the officers subsequently released the three after apologising to them, Mr Brown told CNN that at that moment, he felt he was racially profiled. His son recalled the feeling of “confusion and shock and fear.”
“It went from, ‘Dad, there’s cops outside,’ to ‘come outside with your hands up,’” Samuel said. “That was kind of like, just from zero to 100.”
Mr Thorne also pushed back against the police action. “I don’t get how we were treated as a threat when we’re clearly not one,” he told the Washington Post. He said the property had dozens of showings in the three weeks it had been on the market and that “if we were white, that wouldn’t have happened.”
The police reached the spot with their guns drawn after a neighbour called authorities saying that a suspect arrested at the property on 24 July had returned to the scene, according to the Wyoming Department of Public Safety.
The department denied allegations of racism. It said in its internal review that “race played no role in our officers’ treatment of the individuals, and our officers responded appropriately”, according to a statement released on Friday.
“While it is unfortunate that innocent individuals were placed in handcuffs, our officers responded reasonably and according to department policy based on the information available to them at the time,” said the statement.
Mr Brown slammed the neighbours for reporting against members of minority communities for doing “normal things”.
“If you see a crime, report a crime. But if you see people – Black people, any minority – don’t report people doing normal things,” Mr Thorne told news channel CNN. “You do that, you don’t realise that you can change their life or have their life taken, just you making a phone call. In this instance, it could have been three.”
“You could’ve changed my life, changed my son’s life,” he said.
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