Ving Rhames Was Held at Gunpoint by Police for Being in His Own House
Between his iconic role in Pulp Fiction and his many appearances in the Mission Impossible movies, Ving Rhames is instantly recognizable. And it's incredibly bleak that were it not for that, there's a chance he might not be alive today.
In a radio interview this week, Rhames recounted a story where he was at home in the early afternoon, wearing nothing but basketball shorts, when several police officers, the chief of police, and even a police dog appeared at his door. As Blavity reports:
“I open the door and there is a red dot pointed at my face from a 9-mm. They say put up your hands, literally. I just walked and opened up the door....Then they said 'open the front screen door.' They say do it with one hand so then I have to do it with one hand. My hands are up and they have me outside,” Rhames says.
The chief of police recognized Rhames, and had the officers stand down. The officers revealed a neighbor called 911, telling the operator a “large black man” had broken into a home. When Rhames and the officers visited the person who made the call, that person denied it.
Rhames is now one of the highest-profile black people to report that white passersby or even neighbors called the police on them for no reason. While many of these cases have involved some white stranger asking police to enforce arbitrary, non-law-based rules, like showing photo I.D. to enter a neighborhood pool, many others like Rhames have been accused of breaking into their own homes. In fact, it's hard to hear Rhames' story and not think of Stephon Clark, who was shot by police and left to bleed to death in his grandparents' backyard.
Were he not famous enough for the officer to recognize him, it's a complete toss-up whether or not Rhames would have survived the encounter. And he knows that it could easily have gone another way, saying, "My problem is, as I said this to them, what if it was my son and he had a video game remote or something and you thought it was a gun?"
