While the well-publicized killings of George Floyd, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and countless others at the hands of American law enforcement clearly galvanized what is now known as the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s all too easy and convenient for our media—accustomed to training its focus on such high-profile, individual tragedies—to forget that the primary driver of those protests was and continues to be a pervasive culture of racial bias permeating nearly every aspect of our criminal justice system. Nowhere is that demonstrated more blatantly than in the seemingly routine, everyday racial disparities that law enforcement employs in charging, arresting, and incarcerating individuals suspected of committing a crime.
Much as the only instances of wanton police misconduct or brutality we ever get to witness seem to be those moments captured on video, it’s rare that the more mundane (but often just as biased) bureaucratic processes of incarceration are botched so badly that they reveal as much about the systematic rot in our policing as do those tragic, shocking deaths. A nightmarish experience for one young man recently revealed as much about police attitudes and the disparate treatment they often afford to people of color.
Shane Lee Brown, a 23-year-old Black man, was driving through Henderson, Nevada, one afternoon in January 2020, when he was stopped by Henderson police for an as-of-yet unspecified reason. Brown reportedly did not have his driver’s license with him but identified himself verbally, and provided his social security card for additional identification.
As reported by Julian Mark for the Washington Post, what happened next gives a whole new meaning to “Kafkaesque.”
When officers ran his name, an outstanding bench warrant for a gun charge came up — though not for him, but for a man named Shane Neal Brown, a 49-year-old White man standing 5-foot-11, with brown hair and a white beard, according to the lawsuit. Shane Lee Brown, meanwhile, was 26 years younger, Black and 5-foot-7, with black hair.
Despite the fact that he was not the individual with the outstanding warrant—and in fact bore no conceivable resemblance to that person, a white male 26 years his senior with a different middle name—Brown was immediately taken into custody. He protested multiple times to police that he was not the person they were looking for. However, his pleas were ignored, and two days later he was transferred to a detention facility in Clark County, where he continued to protest his innocence. According to Mark’s report, “The department filed paperwork with the court certifying that it had Shane Neal Brown in custody.”
As noted by the Las Vegas CBS affiliate, at the time of the younger “Black” Brown’s arrest, a prior booking photo existed of the conspicuously older, conspicuously whiter Brown, who had failed to appear for a gun charge in 2019 (thus prompting the issuance of a warrant for his arrest) and had in fact been convicted of his first felony in 1994. The older Brown is also listed as four inches taller than the man the police arrested, and his hair color was different.
So, as the young “Black” Brown’s well-founded lawsuit now filed against these police departments and their respective chiefs points out, there were multiple opportunities for Henderson and (later) Las Vegas law enforcement to discover their mistake, including simply checking “white” Brown’s mugshot. Below, a screenshot of the news report depicting both Browns shows how easily this could have been accomplished:
But apparently they decided not to afford the innocent young man they’d just wrongly arrested the simple courtesy of listening to him.
“At CCDC, Shane Lee Brown once again explained to numerous unknown LVMPD officers and supervisors that he was not the ‘Shane Brown’ named on the felony bench warrant,” the lawsuit said. “Despite being informed of this mistaken identity, none of the unknown LVMPD police or LVMPD corrections officers bothered to review its own records to determine whether Shane Lee Brown was the subject of the warrant.”
Brown remained in custody for six days, until a public defender at his bench hearing was able to advise the court that the police had arrested the wrong man. The judge, after reviewing the stark difference in appearance as well as their age and name disparities, agreed and immediately set the young Brown free.
It’s quite difficult to imagine the same mistake happening if the roles were reversed—if in fact it was the elder white male Brown who was stopped. First one must imagine that he would have been stopped at all. According to research conducted by Ravi Shroff, a professor at NYU who examined a dataset of 100 million traffic stops culled from over 100 police departments in the U.S., Black drivers were 20% more likely to be stopped by police than white drivers relative to their share of the residential population.
The study also found that once stopped, black drivers were searched about 1.5 to 2 times as often as white drivers, while they were less likely to be carrying drugs, guns, or other illegal contraband compared to their white peers.
Shroff’s research also found that Black drivers are also far more likely to be stopped during the day, when police officers (not coincidentally) have a better opportunity to determine their race before making a stop (his research measured the rate of police driver stops, by race, before and after sunset). Note that this data only examined alleged driving offenses; the NAACP has compiled data which show that for criminal investigations overall “[a] Black person is five times more likely to be stopped without just cause than a white person.” None of this, of course, would come as a surprise to Black drivers (or many white drivers, for that matter, who pay attention to who the police target in their own residential areas).
But you also have to imagine that after the elder, white Brown showed his Social Security card, the police would fail to double check his correct name against their records to determine whether he in fact had any outstanding warrants, particularly after he protested his complete innocence. You would have to imagine that they would have been equally careless and dismissive of his protestations, even as they took possession of his vehicle, booked him into custody, even as they made him empty his pockets, turn in his phone, wallet and watch, etc.
Finally you would have to imagine that the elder, white Brown, would still have been transferred to a detention facility without anyone bothering to check the records, despite his vehement, repeated affirmation of his complete innocence and total lack of knowledge of any prior arrest, and kept incarcerated for five additional days before a public defender was assigned, one who had the wherewithal to spot the error made by the police. You would have to imagine that it was not until his case was actually in front of a judge before the police and district attorney realized their mistake. As noted by the Innocence Project, the racial disparity in wrongful convictions (of those later exonerated of the offense) is rather stark:
Innocent Black people spend an average of 13.8 years wrongly imprisoned before being exonerated — about 45% longer than innocent white people. This racial disparity in time spent wrongfully incarcerated holds true across different types of convictions.
In sum, you would have to imagine many things that in all likelihood would never, ever happen simply because the elder Brown was white, while the young Brown was Black. Conversely, one could easily imagine how this encounter by police with a young Black man they wrongly suspected of having an outstanding warrant—for a gun charge—could have easily led to an even worse outcome.
The lawsuit by young Brown against the police departments and those who wrongly arrested and incarcerated him seeks $500,000 in damages.
See also Lauren Sue’s report on this story, here.