Woman detained by 19 policemen 'because she was black'
Fay Wells says race was behind decison to deploy large police presence after a neighbour wrongly identified her as a burglar trying to stage a break-in
Californian Police officers look for a gunman during a joint training exercise simulating an ''emergency crisis''. Photo: Alamy
By Robert Tait, Los Angeles
12:51AM GMT 21 Nov 2015
An emergency call mistakenly reporting an attempted burglary has become the latest focal point fueling the controversy over policing and race in the United States.
Fay Wells, a company executive in California,, shot to attention on social media after describing in a newspaper column how she was held at gun point by 19 policemen outside her own home in Santa Monica - an incident she said happened because she is black.
In an article for the Washington Post, Ms Wells recalled that she left her keys inside her apartment, locking herself out, as she rushed to a football game last September 6. When she returned to the mostly-white middle class block of flats after 11pm, she brought a locksmith to force open the door.
A short while later, alone inside the flat, she was alerted by the sound of a dog barking and a man's voice.
When she went to investigate, she saw a man with a gun pointed at her. He told her: "Come outside with your hands up."
When she complied, she saw two other police officers with their guns trained on her. One shouted: “Who’s in there with you? How many of you are there?”
Ms Wells said one of the policemen pulled her with her hands behind her back into the street, whre she counted another 16 officers.
Despite her objections, police - using a sniffer dog - then searched her flat.
During the whole process, officers refused to explain to Ms Wells what happening or why they had come to her home..
"It didn’t matter that I told the cops I’d lived there for seven months, told them about the locksmith, offered to show a receipt for his services and my ID," she wrote.
"It didn’t matter that I went to Duke [University], that I have an MBA from Dartmouth [College], that I’m a vice president of strategy at a multinational corporation...It didn't matter that I calmly, continually asked them what was happening. What mattered was that I was a woman of colour trying to get into her apartment — in an almost entirely white apartment complex in a mostly white city."
Only after the search party established that there was no-one else inside did one officer explain to Ms Wells that a neighbour had reported an attempted break-in, apparently mistaking, her, a female friend and the locksmith as burglars.
When Ms Wells later confronted the man, who is white, about her ordeal, she wrote, he swore at her.
Jacqueline Seabrooks, chief of Santa Monica police, who is also black, refuted Ms Wells' claim that her treatment was racially motivated.
"As a black woman born and raised in South-Central Los Angeles, I empathise with Ms. Fay Wells and how this experience has made her feel," Chief Seabrooks said. "On the other hand, as an experienced law enforcement executive, I understand the Police Department's response and the need for that response.
"This seeming dichotomy may be difficult for some to accept, particularly given the national dialogue. The 911 [emergency] caller was not wrong for reporting what he believed was an in-progress residential burglary.
