Man Arrested By Police For Driving While Black, Wait'll You See Whose Car He Was In
The morning of April 14 was just like any other morning for Khadafi Keenan Fagan-Pierre. He woke up, got dressed, and went to the driveway of his Gatineau home where he opened up the door of a Black BMW.
Although the vehicle belonged to his father, Orrett Fagan, he often loans the car to his 31-year-old son since they don’t live too far from each other, according to CBC.
Once he opened the door, two police officers who were driving by got out of their car, and asked Fagan-Pierre, “Is this your car?”
When he answered no, one of the officers asked, “Well, whose car is it?”
In response, Fagan-Pierre came back with his own questions: “Why do you need this information? Is the car stolen? Like, what’s going on? Why are you here?”
When one of the officers said he looked “suspicious” getting into the car, Fagan-Pierre began to think that he was being stopped for racial reasons, according to CBC.
What happened next is all too familiar for Black men who have encounters with police.
More from CBC:
Shortly after that, Fagan-Pierre found himself forcibly arrested for reasons that remain unclear. He said police slammed him against the garage, punched him in the back of the head and kicked his leg. In his view, the force was “unreasonable.” He said an officer pushed his face into the pavement and pressed a knee into his back, making it difficult to breathe.
Fagan-Pierre alleges that the police officers only started to become defensive when he expressed that he was being racially profiled.
He was told, “Shut up, this car belongs to a 70-year-old person and you don’t look 70 years old.’”
Fagan-Pierre’s mother, Dian Pierre, witnessed the entire arrest of her son.
When she asked the officers why they questioned her son in the first place, she told CBC that they said, “It’s because of the way he looks and what he was wearing.”
In response to the incident, Gatineau police (Quebec, Canada) released a statement, saying that they arrested Fagan-Pierre for obstructing a police officer in the execution of duty and that his arrest “necessitated the use of force.
