Race relations aren't exactly a strong point in the U.S. One week it's graffiti on a Gap ad, the next it's a blonde 13-year-old girl being taken into police custody. Her crime? Surrounding herself with two young African-American males.
According to an article in the Daily Mail, Landry Thompson was on a weekend trip to Houston with her dance instructor, Emmanuel Hurd, to make a hip-hop video. One minute the pair and another dancer made a pit stop at a gas station to check out GPS to find their hotel, the next the car was surrounded by police.
And Thompson was cuffed and taken to Child Protective Services despite her instructor's protests that he had legal guardianship over the teen.
"They just pulled us out of the car," 29-year-old Hurd said. "Put our hands behind our backs like we were criminals. He asked me who's the girl. She's my student. I said I had a notarized letter from her parents stating that we have full guardianship over her while we're here."
"It really scared me," said Landry. "They were convinced I was a runaway and they put me in the back of a cop car and I was terrified."
Needless to say, her mother wasn't best pleased when she got a phone call in Oklahoma.
“I was horrified,” said mom Destiny Thompson, who had taken care to provide Hurd with her daughter's various documents—from her insurance card, birth certificate, and a sheet of contact numbers.
“She was with the people I wanted her to be with," added Thompson. "She was with people I trusted. And now she was taken away from those people and in a shelter with people I didn’t know.”
After much negotiation and prolonged discussion, Landry was eventually released into Hurd's custody—11 hours later—and all was as it should have been. Except that it wasn't.
Houston Police Department (which obviously takes the view that one is guilty until proven innocent) has not yet released a statement about the incident. Thompson is awaiting an apology, while Hurd is considering legal action.
Were the police just doing their jobs or something else?
Printer-friendly version