(The AEGIS Alliance) – A real estate broker who is a Black man, as well as his Black customer, got put in handcuffs while the broker was showing a house in Michigan after cops apparently received a phone call about a burglary in the Grand Rapids residential area of Wyoming.
Eric Brown had been presenting a residence to Roy Thorne, as well as Thorne’s teen boy when at some point they came across the cops who were standing outside the house and aiming firearms towards the home. Brown stated he believed he may need to postpone the house showing considering those police officers seemed to be on the lookout for a criminal, according to WGN TV.
The three interacted with the cops that ordered all of them to step outside the home lined up in a single file and put their hands up.
“They keep their guns drawn on us until all of us were in cuffs,” Roy Thorne informed WGN TV. “So, that was a little traumatizing I guess. You know, under the current climate of things, you just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Brown clarified the circumstance to authorities and presented them with his realty qualifications, at that point, the cops uncuffed the three and also gave an apology. Police claimed they had been reacting to a 911 phone call from a nearby neighbor.
Captain Timothy Pols said the caller thought a suspect that’d been apprehended burglarizing that exact same property one week prior had come back. He refuted the claim there was “a racial element” to the cop’s reaction.
Thorne pointed out that a cop returned to ask for forgiveness not once, but twice, however, the “damage” had been done.
“My son was a little disturbed. He hasn’t seen anything like that,” Thorne stated. “He’s not going to forget this.”
Brown mentioned the incident made him “pretty anxious, or nervous or maybe even a little bit scared” concerning how he could safeguard himself while presenting homes down the road.
Captain Pols stated the Wyoming Police Department’s responding officers were merely sticking to proper procedure when they handcuffed Brown as well as the Thornes.
“After listening to the individuals’ explanation for why they were in the house, officers immediately removed the handcuffs,” Captain Pols said in a statement. “The Wyoming Department of Public Safety takes emergency calls such as this seriously and officers rely on their training and department policy in their response.”
Thankfully, these particular responding officers appeared to be properly trained, this incident could have ended much worse, and even deadly.
Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
