Neighbor Makes Burglary Call To Cops On Black Woman Entering Her Own Apartment You guys remember when Skip Gates had a run-in with the cops outside his house? Well apparently that wasn’t an anomaly. We were moved to tears by a recent tale shared by a black female executive named Fay Wells in the Washington Post . In her essay Wells recounts the events of Sept. 6, 2015 when she accidentally locked herself out of her apartment. She was late getting to her soccer game, so she decided to deal with it afterwards. A few hours later she called a locksmith and had just entered her apartment when things got noisy outside: I heard barking. I approached my front window and loudly asked what was going on. Peering through my blinds, I saw a gun. A man stood at the bottom of the stairs, pointing it at me. I stepped back and heard: “Come outside with your hands up.” I thought: This man has a gun and will kill me if I don’t come outside. At the same time, I thought: I’ve heard this line from policemen in movies. Although he didn’t identify himself, perhaps he’s an officer. I left my apartment in my socks, shorts and a light jacket, my hands in the air. “What’s going on?” I asked again. Two police officers had guns trained on me. They shouted: “Who’s in there with you? How many of you are there?” I said it was only me and, hands still raised, slowly descended the stairs, focused on one officer’s eyes and on his pistol. I had never looked down the barrel of a gun or at the face of a man with a loaded weapon pointed at me. In his eyes, I saw fear and anger. I had no idea what was happening, but I saw how it would end: I would be dead in the stairwell outside my apartment, because something about me — a 5-foot-7, 125-pound black woman — frightened this man with a gun. I sat down, trying to look even less threatening, trying to de-escalate. I again asked what was going on. I confirmed there were no pets or people inside. I told the officers I didn’t want them in my apartment. I said they had no right to be there. They entered anyway. One pulled me, hands behind my back, out to the street. The neighbors were watching. Only then did I notice the ocean of officers. I counted 16. They still hadn’t told me why they’d come. And this is exactly why there are such issues in this country. You can’t tell us that if this woman were white she would have been treated like this. They didn’t ask or explain anything!!! I learned that the Santa Monica Police Department had dispatched 19 officers after one of my neighbors reported a burglary at my apartment. It didn’t matter that I told the cops I’d lived there for seven months, told them about the locksmith, offered to show a receipt for his services and my ID. It didn’t matter that I went to Duke, that I have an MBA from Dartmouth, that I’m a vice president of strategy at a multinational corporation. It didn’t matter that I’ve never had so much as a speeding ticket. It didn’t matter that I calmly, continually asked them what was happening. It also didn’t matter that I didn’t match the description of the person they were looking for — my neighbor described me as Hispanic when he called 911. What mattered was that I was a woman of color trying to get into her apartment — in an almost entirely white apartment complex in a mostly white city — and a white man who lived in another building called the cops because he’d never seen me before. The plot thickens too. Once the confusion was sorted out Wells became pretty irate, asking for the names and badge numbers of the officers who responded. She also confronted her dumb neighbor, who wasn’t even apologetic: I introduced myself to the reporting neighbor and asked if he was aware of the gravity of his actions — the ocean of armed officers, my life in danger. He stuttered about never having seen me, before snippily asking if I knew my next-door neighbor. After confirming that I did and questioning him further, he angrily responded, “I’m an attorney, so you can go f— yourself,” and walked away. SMH. We’re not sure who is worse — the racist nebby neighbor or the overly aggressive racist cops. We hope that Wells gets some kind of justice — an investigation by the SMPD internal affairs, an apology, something. She’s suffered some pretty severe anxiety and trauma as a result of this incident so we hope she is able to get some relief from that very soon. Still, this is pretty scary because it really could be any of us, and it really could have gone terribly wrong. Shutterstock
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19 Officers Respond After White Neighbor Makes Burglary Call On Santa Monica Woman Locked Out Of Her Own Apartment
