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Two Black comedians say they were racially profiled and illegally stopped by Clayton County police at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport via a drug search program that they claim disproportionately targets minority airline passengers, per the Associated Press.
On Tuesday (October 11), lawyers for comedians Eric André and Clayton English filed a lawsuit in Atlanta, alleging that the airport's police program violates the constitutional rights of Black passengers through racial profiling and coercive searches.
Just as they were about to board their flights, the two men say Clayton County officers stopped them in separate incidents because they are Black and grilled them about drugs as other passengers watched.
“People were gawking at me and I looked suspicious when I had done nothing wrong,” André said in an interview, noting that the April 2020 encounter was “dehumanizing and demoralizing.”
According to the lawsuit, the program, with a stated purpose of fighting drug trafficking, has rarely found illegal substances or resulted in criminal charges.
The stops are selectively made in narrow jet bridges used to access the plane by Clayton County police who take the passengers' boarding passes and identification, interrogate them, and sometimes search their bags, per the suit.
The police department calls the stops "random" and "consensual encounters, but instead the stops “rely on coercion, and targets are selected disproportionately based on their race," lawyers for the comedians argue.
According to police records, of 378 jet bridge stops between Aug. 30, 2020, to April 30, 2021, 56 percent involved Black people, and people of color accounted for 68 percent of all stops.
Of the hundreds of stops, only three reported drug seizures.
English agreed to an officer's request to search his bag in October 2020, believing he had no choice.
“I felt completely powerless. I felt violated. I felt cornered," English said during a press conference. "I felt like I had to comply if I wanted everything to go smoothly.”
André said 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," he said. “If Black people don’t speak up for each other, who will?”
The comedians are suing Clayton County, the police chief, four police officers, and a district attorney's office investigator. They are seeking a jury trial and damages and are asking that the Clayton County police jet bridge interdiction program be deemed unconstitutional.
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