Without Evidence, Tyler Perry Accuses Police of Profiling Him

Without Evidence, Tyler Perry Accuses Police of Profiling Him

Remember, everyone’s a victim, even one of the wealthiest and most successful Americans in history.

Here’s Tyler Perry’s story:

Racial profiling “should be a hate crime investigated by the FBI,” filmmaker Tyler Perry wrote in a Facebook posting Sunday in which he described his own tense encounter with police.

“It was so hostile,” Perry, who is African-American, wrote. “I was so confused. It was happening so fast that I could easily see how this situation could get out of hand very quickly. I didn’t feel safe at all.”

But here’s what happened:

Police pulled him over after he made a left turn from the right lane, he said. It was an illegal turn, the officer told him.

So a man makes an illegal turn and gets pulled over by the police. Gasp, call the FBI.

But wait…

“I signaled to get into the turning lane, then made the turn because I have to be sure I’m not being followed,” Perry said he told the officer.

“Why do you think someone would be following you?” the officer, standing at his driver’s door, asked.

He then heard “a hard banging” on his passenger-side window, Perry wrote.

“I had never been in this position before so I asked the officer who was at my window what was going on and why is someone banging on the window like that,” Perry wrote.

“Let your window down, let your window down. Your windows are tinted,” he said the officer told him.

When Perry lowered the passenger window he saw a second officer standing there.

“What is wrong with you?” that officer said.

“He thinks he’s being followed,” the first officer said.

“Why do you think someone is following you?” asked the other. “What is wrong with you?”

So a vehicle with tinted windows makes an illegal turn and the driver tells the police officer who pulled him over (one of the most vulnerable positions a cop can find himself in) that he’s worried about being followed.  Think about that: If you don’t recognize Tyler Perry (which probably makes you racist), would that not sound a little paranoid to you and elevate the tension of the situation just a bit?

Then Perry, ever the genius, reaches for something:

The officer on the driver’s side then reached into the car “pulling on the switch that turns the car on and off,” Perry said. “Put your foot on the brake, put your foot on the brake!” Perry said the officer commanded.

“I was so confused as to what he was doing, or what he thought he was doing,” Perry wrote. “It looked like he was trying to pull the switch out of the dashboard.”

Perry wrote that he then realized the officer was trying to grab the key, which was not there.

“I reached down into the cup holder to get the key, not realizing that the key had a black leather strap on it[.]”

Brilliant.

And then comes my favorite part:

“As I grabbed [the key] they both tensed up and I dropped it as I heard my mother’s voice from when I was a little boy.”

“If you get stopped by the police, especially if they are white policemen, you say ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’, and if they want to take you in, you go with them,” Perry said his mother often told him. “Don’t resist, you hear me? Don’t make any quick moves, don’t run, you just go.”

“It wasn’t until after I heard her voice that I realized that both of these officers were white,” he wrote.

My family is whiter than the Osmonds and other than trying to make me afraid of policemen of a certain color, my mother told me the exact same thing.

I would like to now close with this question….

If the windows of Tyler Perry’s car are indeed tinted, HOW DID THE POLICE OFFICERS RACIALLY PROFILE HIM?

From where I stand, the only one doing any kind of racial profiling here is Tyler Perry.

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