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It isn’t a secret that race relations in the United States are especially tense, most apparently in how police interact with communities of color. For Fay Wells, her recent run-in with police in California underscores why activist groups have banded together in protest of the tactics cops employ.

Wells provided a special to The Washington Post and highlighted how an innocent occurrence of being locked out of her Santa Monica apartment last September morphed into a frightening affair.  Wells, a business executive, was forced to face the glare of 19 police officers who failed to follow protocol or show her any modicum of respect.

Wells said that on Sept. 6, she locked herself out of her apartment on her way to an adult-league soccer game. Upon her return home, complete with a locksmith, she settled in for a quiet evening until all hell broke loose when the Santa Monica police stormed her place.

From the Post:

Later, I learned that the Santa Monica Police Department had dispatched 19 officers after one of my neighbors reported a burglary at my apartment. It didn’t matter that I told the cops I’d lived there for seven months, told them about the locksmith, offered to show a receipt for his services and my ID. It didn’t matter that I went to Duke, that I have an MBA from Dartmouth, that I’m a vice president of strategy at a multinational corporation. It didn’t matter that I’ve never had so much as a speeding ticket. It didn’t matter that I calmly, continually asked them what was happening. It also didn’t matter that I didn’t match the description of the person they were looking for — my neighbor described me as Hispanic when he called 911. What mattered was that I was a woman of color trying to get into her apartment — in an almost entirely white apartment complex in a mostly white city — and a white man who lived in another building called the cops because he’d never seen me before.

Read the rest of Fay Wells’ account by following this link.

Photo: Fibonacci Blue/CC By 2.0