In a recent interview with Sirius XM host Clay Cane, veteran actor Ving Rhames recalled a recent, completely horrifying incident in which cops pulled a gun on him in his own home in Santa Monica, California.
When asked about experiences of racism in his own life, Rhames explained that a neighbour called 911 to report a “large black man” breaking in to his house, which led armed officers to show up, out of the blue, on his doorstep.
“This is the god’s honest truth, this happened this year,” he said, explaining that he was at home watching sports at 2.15 in the afternoon, when he heard a noise in the backyard and assumed it was his two English Bulldog puppies playing.
He got up to answer a knock at the door, dressed only in a pair of basketball shorts, and things escalated very quickly, with no apparent warning. “I open the door and there is a red dot pointed at my face from a 9mm, and they say, ‘Put up your hands.’ Literally.”
He said that officers lowered their weapons when a police captain recognised him – not because of his roles in Pulp Fiction or the long-running Mission Impossible series, but because their sons had played on opposing high school basketball teams.
The actor went on to explain that the incident left him in fear for his child’s life, recalling the shooting of unarmed young black man Trayvon Martin:
“Here I am in my own home, alone in some basketball shorts … What if it was my son and he had a video game remote or something, and you thought it was a gun. Just like, I don’t know, Trayvon had a bag of Skittles.”
Police quickly apologised for the and accompanied him to the house of the neighbour in question, but when asked about it, she apparently denied making the call. You can listen to the full interview with Ving Rhames below:
