Police in Forney, Texas are most certainly color blind, perhaps also car model blind and age blind - but they are almost certainly not race blind. A 911 call came in to them about four black men on the road waving a gun out the window of a beige or tan colored Toyota.
So what did they do?
They pulled over a burgundy Nissan Maxima with four little kids and a mother, then held them at gunpoint.
Barbour: "What is wrong? My kids!"
Officer: "How old are they?"
Barbour: "They're six and eight and ten, nine. What are we doing?"
Officer: "Hold on a second, okay?"
Barbour: "What is going on? Oh my God, you will terrify my children."
Officer: "We got a complaint of a vehicle matching your description and your license plate, waving a gun out the window."
At least they ultimately realized their mistake, but not before terrifying the children.
Officer: "Ya'll okay? Just ya'll in the car?"
Child: "No im scared."
Officer: "It's okay."
Child: "No, are we going to jail?"
Officer: "No. No one is going to jail."
Child: (Scream, crying)
Officer: "Hey, stop crying. It's okay. It's okay. Everything's fine now."
The sequence as the little kid comes out of the car with his hands up is particularly awful.
The coup de grace?
Police admit they made a mistake but are refusing to apologize.
There are serious questions about whether the police fabricated the notion that the license plate matched as an excuse to justify the stop. Comments discussing this
in the video on Youtube suggest that the caller did not provide a license plate number, and most of the articles discussing the situation do not report on a matched license plate being the reason for the stop.
Further, the people who made the 911 call don't mention a license plate when quoted in this report:
Forney police were on the lookout for a beige or tan Toyota occupied by four black males after Eva and Stacy Whatley saw someone in that car waving a gun out the window and called 911 around 1 a.m. on August 10.
"She repeatedly tells them it's a tan or gold Toyota Camry or Corolla," Stacy said.
"We told them it was occupied by four African-American males," Eva added.
But when they saw police pulling over Barbour - who was driving a burgundy Nissan, not a tan Toyota - "We told them you are stopping the wrong car," Stacy told News 8.
In any case a license plate number called in is a much less reliable identifier than the color of a car. You can't plausibly stop a vehicle just because of a color match, but you should be able to reject as implausible a stop if the color does not come close.
And would an apology really be that difficult?
2:45 PM PT: I see there is already a diary about this. This one provides a slightly different perspective and some other info, so I'll keep it it.