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?”
China’s military news agency yesterday warned that Japanese militarism is infiltrating society through series such as Pokemon and Detective Conan, after recent controversies involving events at sensitive sites. In recent days, anime conventions throughout China have reportedly banned participants from dressing as characters from Pokemon or Detective Conan and prohibited sales of related products. China Military Online yesterday posted an article titled “Their schemes — beware the infiltration of Japanese militarism in culture and sports.” The article referenced recent controversies around the popular anime series Pokemon, Detective Conan and My Hero Academia, saying that “the evil influence of Japanese militarism lives on in
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
RSS