ST. LOUIS — The ACLU of Missouri has filed a lawsuit against the University City Police Department for tackling, unlawfully arresting and violating the rights of a 55-year-old Black man as he walked in an affluent neighborhood.
Instead of casually starting a conversation, a University City Police officer waited until Graham had left the porch of his friend and sped toward Graham as he was walking alone in the 6300 block of McPherson Avenue. The officer jumped out of the car, demanding to talk to Graham, asking him, “Do you live here?”
Graham immediately began to fear for his life and yelled for help. The situation escalated – despite the fact that officers were called to look for a suspect that did not match Graham’s description in a call about a trespassing suspect four blocks away.
“It is profoundly disturbing that an officer would see a Black man walking through University City and automatically think he’s suspicious, even though the only thing he had in common with the suspect description is that he was a Black man,” said Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU of Missouri.
Graham was upset that the officer assumed that he did not belong in the neighborhood since Graham had done odd jobs for many of the residents of the Parkview subdivision over the years and the officer had just seen Graham casually interacting with his friend.
Despite all of this, the officer arrested Graham for failure to immediately comply with the officer’s unconstitutional request to identify himself.
Graham was then taken to the University City Police Department where he was booked and placed in jail for seven hours. The charge against him was dismissed.
Blacks are stopped at a rate 44 percent greater than expected based solely on their proportion of the driving-age population while driving in University City, according to the Missouri Attorney General’s 2016 Vehicle Stops Report. African Americans are 3.5 times more likely to be searched in University City than Whites and 3.7 times more likely to be arrested.
Law enforcement agencies are not required by the state to track racial information in pedestrians stops, such as Mr. Graham’s and that of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was killed by a Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson during a pedestrian stop in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.