An African American man in North Carolina was handcuffed and dragged out of his own home in his boxer shorts, in view of his neighbors, after white Raleigh police officers responded to an inadvertently triggered burglar alarm in the early afternoon at his house. From ABC News:
An African-American homeowner says he endured the "most humiliating experience of my life" when white police officers answered a false burglar alarm at his North Carolina home and ended up placing him in handcuffs at gunpoint and walking him to a police car in just his underwear as his neighbors watched.
"I was counting the seconds because I thought he was going to kill me," Kazeem Oyeneyin, 31, told ABC News on Saturday of the confrontation with police at his home in Raleigh. "He was shaking the gun. All he has to do is slip and hit that trigger and I'm dead."
Oyeneyin has lived at his house for five years. The burglar alarm had been mistakenly tripped by a friend of his who was staying at his house that day. The alarm was tied into Oyeneyin’s phone, and after being woken up from a sound sleep (he works nights), Oyeneyin promptly turned it off and went back to bed.
Twenty minutes later, a Raleigh police officer shows up, gun drawn, opens the front door and yells inside. An in-house security camera recorded the episode.
Oyeneyin (who has a valid concealed weapon permit) hears the shouting and walks downstairs. He sees the officer standing in his foyer, whom he immediately advises that he has a firearm, which he is carrying because he has no idea who just entered his house and woke him up.
The cop tells Oyeneyin to drop the firearm and Oyeneyin immediately complies. Without bothering to ask for identification, or even ask the most obvious question—whether Oyeneyin is the owner of the house—the officer appears to assume that Oyeneyin can’t possibly live here. He cuffs Oyeneyin and orders him to his knees. In the interim, the officer’s sergeant is summoned to the scene.
According to Oyeneyin’s statement afterward, the first officer asks him for ID at some point but the camera does not specifically show that. According to Oyeneyin, he attempted to advise the police that he was in fact the homeowner but they refused to believe him.
After several officers have arrived, Oyeneyin remains in the foyer, but he is then, over his own protests, hustled out of the house, onto his front lawn, where his neighbors have an opportunity to witness the entire spectacle, and then into a patrol car. Oyeneyin yells out to his neighbors to identify him for the police, but no one responds. Meanwhile, police search Oyeneyin’s house. Finally, another police officer arrives on the scene, who Oyeneyin happens to know, and at that time, Oyeneyin is confirmed as the homeowner.
"This was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life," he said, adding that he doesn't have a criminal record and has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. "I mean, I felt like my character was defamed. I went outside the other day, the neighbors wouldn't even wave at me. They don't know what's going on. They think I'm a whole criminal over here."
The video of the episode is below.
At first blush this might seem to be yet another instance of a hyper-zealous police department following through on its everyday, habitual, racist profiling: if you get summoned to a house and there’s a black man inside, he must be a criminal.
But before we jump to conclusions, we should consider the fact that Oyeneyin committed several unwritten offenses here that might have justified the police’s actions. These offenses are not strictly set forth in the penal code but they are no less serious because of that fact.
First, and probably most importantly, as a backdrop, Oyeneyin committed the offense of being successful while black. Apparently, he is a well-regarded Hip-Hop DJ and promoter, living in a decent neighborhood, and with his own in-house security system. That fact alone is enough to raise suspicion in the minds of the police.
Secondary to this point, Oyeneyin exacerbated the problem by homeowning while black. In the minds of many gentrified whites, African Americans generally do not own homes but rent them. This likely confused the officer and added to the tension of the entire scene.
Thirdly, Oyeneyin committed the offense of being large and male while black. The officer is clearly intimidated by Oyeneyin’s size in the video. Even though he has a gun pointed directly at the unarmed Oyeneyin, in this officer’s mind there is no telling what such a large black man could be capable of. The most prudent thing is to get him in handcuffs immediately.
Fourth (and critical), Oyeneyin committed the offense of legally owning a weapon while black. Because come on, we all know who the folks that wrote the Second Amendment were talking about—and who they weren’t.
Fifth, (and this may be the most important aspect of the entire episode) Oyeneyin was wearing nothing but boxers while black. There are few things more intimidating to many white males than the physique of African American men. Oyeneyin’s inadvertent display of his nearly naked body to this fairly diminutive white policeman likely aggravated the situation beyond the officer’s ability to control his own impulses.
So these are all the things we have to remember before we prematurely reach the seemingly reasonable conclusion that, had this been a white person’s burglar alarm mistakenly triggered in the early afternoon—and had a white male come sleepily to the door and advised that it all had been a mistake—the police officer likely would have holstered his weapon, simply asked for confirmation that this was the homeowner, maybe even apologized for the intrusion.
And the handcuffs would have never even come out.