BEING NEIGHBOURLY WHILE BEING BLACK
US Black pastor arrested for watering his neighbour’s flowers
An Alabama pastor was handcuffed and shoved into a police car – in an arrest that he said should never have happened.
Recently released police body camera footage shows Michael Jennings, a longtime pastor at Vision of Abundant Life Church in Sylacauga, Alabama, being accosted by police in May.
Jennings was wielding a garden hose and aiming water at the flowers outside his out-of-town neighbour’s house.
When another neighbour called the police to report a suspicious person. Police said he was belligerent. While he did not deny getting testy, Jennings said it never got bad enough to warrant arresting him.
In the now-viral body-cam video, an officer asked Jennings why he was at the house and whose car was parked in the driveway. Jennings said it was the neighbour's.
“I’m supposed to be here. I’m Pastor Jennings. I live across the street,” Jennings told police, according to CNN. The officer asked him what he was doing there. “Watering the flowers,” he replied, as he continued to water the flowers.
The neighbour who had initially called police before recognising Jennings came outside to tell police she had made a mistake, and said they should not arrest him.
Jennings accused them of racial profiling and the officer placed him under arrest.
They charged him with obstructing government operations after he refused to provide physical ID beyond his pronouncement, even though he explained that he had not brought it with him when he left the house to walk across the street and squirt water on his neighbour's plants.
The charges were later dropped. Jennings’ attorney called the move “irrational, irresponsible, and illegal” and said the footage corroborated any basis for “legal action against the officers and more,” he told NPR.
“This video makes it clear that these officers decided they were going to arrest Pastor Jennings less than five minutes after pulling up and then tried to rewrite history, claiming he hadn’t identified himself, when that was the first thing he did,” Atlanta-based civil rights attorney Harry Daniels, who is representing Jennings, told NPR.
Jennings called it a misunderstanding and said it should never have resulted in an arrest. “He got out of the car. He’s already fired up. I’m telling them, ‘You’re making a mistake, this is wrong what y’all are doing,’” Jennings told WIAT-TV.
The sergeant yelled back, “‘Shut up and listen. You talk too much’”Jennings told the news outlet.
“I said, ‘You don’t tell me to shut up boy. I’m a grown man,’”Jennings continued, to which the sergeant replied, "’You going to jail, that’s it. Lock him up.’”
- New York Daily News
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