The house was in a quiet neighborhood and was well priced. Roy Thorne was in the market to buy, and real estate agent Eric Brown was in the business to show. And “elderly” neighbors across the street were in the business of keeping their eyes out for burglars.
Someone was arrested a week earlier after breaking into the house, the statement said. The neighbor thought Mr. Brown’s car, a black Hyundai Genesis, looked like a black Mercedes-Benz sedan that had been parked in the driveway at the time of the previous arrest, according to a recording of the call provided by the police.
Did the neighbors call the police because they saw a black car in the driveway or black people emerge from the car and go into the house?
The officers told Mr. Brown about the vehicles, and, according to body camera footage obtained by WOOD-TV, he replied, “Yeah, and my car definitely looks like a Mercedes.”
“I was both being true and being sarcastic,” Mr. Brown said on Sunday.
It may be true that to the eye of an elderly neighbor, one black sedan looks like another. Some people just aren’t good with distinguishing cars. That can happen. But the police narrative fails when they arrived in response to the elderly neighbor’s call that there was a black car in the driveway. First, there’s the “so what?” response, as they should know the house is for sale and being shown. How do they know this? They were there the week before and made an arrest. They were told by the owner the house was for sale. Houses for sale get shown to potential buyers or they don’t get sold.
And that leads to the second hole in the story. On July 24th, they made an arrest. The car was impounded.
The caller said the same individual had arrived in the same black Mercedes sedan and parked on the street in front of the house. He had gotten out of the car, walked around and was now sitting back in the car.
So the caller made a mistake. It happens. When the cops arrive, and see that the car isn’t the “same black Mercedes sedan,” because the cops have the ability to read the marque off the car and most are able to distinguish between a Hyundai and a Mercedes, particularly when they should know the Mercedes has already been seized and impounded (which should have been a giveaway from the outset), they shake their heads at the silly, mistaken call, get back in their cars and drive away. But they didn’t.
Mr. Brown and Mr. Thorne were looking around upstairs when Mr. Thorne’s 15-year-old son, Samuel Thorne, sprinted up to them from the first floor and said there were “a lot of police officers outside,” said Mr. Brown, 46.
That’s when Mr. Thorne, 45, looked out a window and saw a police officer with a gun drawn, hiding behind a tree, Mr. Brown said. Mr. Thorne called out to the officer, who pointed a gun at him, both men said.
The officer instructed the two men and the teenager to come downstairs and out the door with their hands raised, Mr. Brown said.
When they came out of the house, they were cuffed. After the real estate agent Brown told them his license was in pocket, the police let them go.
“You have a better day,” one of the officers at the scene told the real estate agent and his clients, according to the footage. “Sorry for the confusion.”
While there may have been confusion on the part of the elderly neighbors, there should have been none of the part of the cops. Once they saw that it wasn’t the dreaded black Mercedes sedan that had been impounded a week before, whatever suspicion arose from the call evaporated. They had nothing, no reason to take any action whatsoever. But, of course, they didn’t let the complete lack of suspicion prevent them from doing their “duty.”
Mr. Thorne reached the officer and was placed in handcuffs per standard department
protocol. Officers directed Mr. Thorne to sit in the back of a police car and explained he was
being detained but was not under arrest. Officers then directed the second individual, Mr.
Brown, to walk toward their position on the street in front of the house. Mr. Brown followed
all directions given to him.
Having fully cooperated in every respect, Thorne was still cuffed and put into the squad car. The justification is characterized as “standard department protocol,” which is the cop way of saying the First Rule of Policing. Even though they had no lawful justification to do anything, their safety comes first at the expense of Thorne’s right to be left alone. After all, a cop never knows, even though they did know that the people in the house were definitely not the same guy they already arrested. Just because the police call it “standard protocol” neither makes it right nor lawful.
But was this racist?
Kyle Gummere, the property’s listing agent working for the owners of the house, said he did not believe the neighbor called the police based on the race of those who were inside the house.
That could well be, even though the neighbor also saw who was in the car. But what about the cops who decided to round up the black people in the house even after they should have known the caller was wrong?
Mr. Brown said that what happened was a clear case of racial profiling.
“If we walked out of there, and I’d been a white lady and her white client and daughter, they would’ve dropped those guns in a heartbeat,” he said.
Curiously, Brown not only changed races in his analogy, but sex as well. And the police, unsurprisingly, assert that it wasn’t about race at all.
“Race played no role in our officers’ treatment of the individuals,” the department’s statement said. “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.”
The information available to the police at the time was that they had no business commanding anyone out of the house or taking any of the ensuring action. Maybe what they’re arguing is that they would have engaged in similarly lawless action if the people inside were white women. But then, the cops investigated themselves and decided what the officers did was entirely reasonable and proper, so no harm, no foul. After all, no one was beaten or shot, so why should anyone be concerned about how the police dealt with three black men being shown a house for sale?
As for Thorne, he still wants to buy a house, but determined that this was not the neighborhood for him. Go figure.
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