A black woman was forced to stay eight days in a mental facility, and pay $13,000 because police didn’t believe the BMW she was driving was hers. Kamilah Brock, the woman in question who works as a banker, is suing New York city. Understandably.
It all started after she was ‘caught’ at a red light without her hands on the steering wheel (yep) and brought into NYPD’s 30th precinct before being released without charges. Upon going to collect her car, it turned out that the police didn’t believe she was the owner.
‘They put me in handcuffs and said they just need to put me in handcuffs to take me to my car. And I said OK, whatever it’s gonna take to get to my car,’ she recalls. ‘Then EMS approached me. And they said we’re gonna take you to your car. And I’m like, in an ambulance? I’m going to my car in an ambulance? I’m going to my car in an ambulance? I was just so confused.’
Next minute, she was in Harlem hospital psychiatric ward, and remembers being stripped naked and injected with sedatives – according to The Daily Mail. ‘He held onto me and then the doctor stuck me in the arm and I was on a stretcher and I woke up to them taking my clothes off, specifically my underwear.’
Her lawyer, Michael Lamonsoff, says that during the eight days she was in hospital, staff constantly tried to get her to says he wasn’t the owner of her own car. Also to deny she was a banker, and that President Obama followed her on Twitter – despite the fact that all of these things were true.
Lamonsoff told The Huffington Post, ‘If a white woman was trying to reclaim her BMW impounded by police, would she have been made a victim? Would she have been questioned? Would she have been subject to sarcastic comments? Would she be made to justify who she was in order to ask for help? I don’t think so. I do think race played a part in this.’
We hope that she wipes the floor with the state, and gets the compensation she deserves – watch this space as the case unfolds.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.