Comedians Eric Andre and Clayton English are challenging a police program at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport that they said violates the constitutional rights of airline passengers, particularly black passengers, through racial profiling and coercive searches just as they are about to board their flights.
Lawyers for the two men on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta alleging that they were racially profiled and illegally stopped by Clayton County police at Atlanta airport.
The two men, well-known comedians and actors, said that officers singled them out during separate stops roughly six months apart because they are black and grilled them about drugs as other passengers watched.
Photo: AP
“People were gawking at me and I looked suspicious when I had done nothing wrong,” Andre said in an interview, calling the experience “dehumanizing and demoralizing.”
While the stated purpose of the program is to fight drug trafficking, drugs are rarely found, criminal charges seldom result and seized cash provides a financial windfall for the police department, the lawsuit said.
Clayton County police officers and investigators from the county district attorney’s office selectively stop passengers in the narrow jet bridges used to access planes, the lawsuit said.
The officers take the passengers’ boarding passes and identification and interrogate them, sometimes searching their bags, before they board their flights, the lawyers said in the lawsuit.
The police department calls the stops “consensual encounters,” and says they are “random,” but in reality the stops “rely on coercion, and targets are selected disproportionately based on their race,” the lawyers said.
Clayton County police spokesperson Julia Isaac said the department does not comment on pending litigation.
Police records show that from Aug. 30, 2020, to April 30 last year there were 402 jet bridge stops, and the passenger’s race was listed for 378 of those stops. Of those 378 passengers, 211, or 56 percent, were black, and people of color accounted for 258 total stops, or 68 percent, the lawsuit said.
Those 402 stops resulted in three reported drug seizures: about 10g of drugs from one passenger, 26 grams of “suspected THC [Tetrahydrocannabinol] gummies” from another, and six prescription pills without a prescription from a third, the lawsuit said.
Only the first and third person were charged.
Andre said he felt a “moral calling” to bring the lawsuit “so these practices can stop and these cops can be held accountable for this, because it’s unethical.”
“I have the resources to bring national attention and international attention to this incident. It’s not an isolated incident,” he said. “If black people don’t speak up for each other, who will?”
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