Eric Brown, a Michigan realtor, and his client, Roy Thorne, said they were racially profiled after being handcuffed during a house showing on Sunday when armed police officers responded to a reported break-in.
WGN reported that the realtor was showing his client a home in Wyoming, Michigan, when cops arrived. Wyoming is roughly two-and-a-half hours west of Detroit.
“Roy looked outside and noticed there were officers there and were pointing guns toward the property,” Brown said.
Police arrived, asked them to exit the home, and all three of them were put in handcuffs, including Thorne’s 15-year-old son.
“They keep their guns drawn on us until all of us were in cuffs,” Thorne said. “So, that was a little traumatizing. I guess because, under the current climate of things, you just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
After having handcuffed the men and young boy, Brown was allowed to prove to the officers that he had the credentials to show the house as a real estate agent.
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The Wyoming Police Department said that officers immediately removed the handcuffs as soon as they could verify that they were all supposed to be there.
“That officer came back and apologized again, but at the same time, the damage is done,” Thorne said. “My son was a little disturbed. He hasn’t seen anything like that … he’s not going to forget this.”
They also mentioned having been there in response to a 911 call from a neighbor reporting a break-in and claimed the house had been recently broken into.
“Officers were aware that a previous burglary had occurred at this same address on July 24 and that a suspect was arrested and charged for unlawful entry during that incident,” Capt. Timothy Pols said in a statement to WOOD-TV.
“The caller indicated that the previously arrested suspect had returned and again entered the house,” he added.
Pols said the handcuffing is just standard procedure.
Brown, however, was left feeling traumatized after the incident.
“I feel pretty anxious, or nervous or maybe even a little bit scared about what do I do to protect myself if I’m going to show a home and the authorities just get called on a whim like that,” he said.
“Am I just automatically the criminal? Because that’s pretty much how we were treated in that situation.”
When asked about whether this could have possibly been racial profiling situation, Pols said, “The department was responding to a call for service; there wasn’t a racial element to it.”
Brown believes that if he were white, the neighbor wouldn’t have called the police, and they wouldn’t have handcuffed them.
