Eric André and Clayton English are filing a lawsuit against the Clayton County police for alleged racial profiling during coercive searches at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. While the two are seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as having their legal costs covered, they also hope to have the Clayton County police’s jet bridge interdiction program declared unconstitutional.
André and English's lawyers described the stops as relying “on coercion, and targets are selected disproportionately based on their race.” The police department, on the other hand, claims the stops as “consensual encounters” that are selected at “random.”
Outside of Atlanta’s federal courthouse, André explained that he believed he had a “moral calling” to file 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. If Black people don’t speak up for each other, who will?” he added.
André tweeted about the incident after it went down back in 2021, writing that he was "just racially profiled by two plain clothes Atlanta PD police in Delta terminal T3 at the Atlanta airport. They stopped me on the way down the bridge to the plane for a ‘random’ search and asked they could search me for drugs. I told them no. At that moment, I was the only POC on line.”
He later described it as “old-school, Giuliani stop-and-frisk racial profiling” while appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
[Via]