A young woman in Wisconsin is suing after she says officers crashed their cruiser into her car, then jumped out with their weapons drawn as she awaited a job interview.
Twenty-year-old Robin Anderson recalled sitting in her car outside an Applebee’s restaurant at Bayshore Town Center on the morning of Dec. 20, 2017. Anderson, who arrived early to her interview, had parallel parked her Hyundai outside a cell phone store not far from the popular eatery.
Robin Anderson said polie paid for her busted window, but not the dents in her car. (Image courtesy of Robin Anderson)
Before she knew it, a Glendale Police squad car had slammed into her passenger side door. One of the officers hopped out, smashed what was left of her passenger side window and pointed a gun at her before ordering her to crawl over the shards of broken glass and out of her car, Anderson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“Don’t move or they’ll shoot you,” she recalled telling herself.
Glendale Police chalked up the incident to a case of mistaken identity, however, Anderson believes she was racially profiled. It turns out police were looking for a group of African-American men suspected to be behind a string of cell phone store robberies in the area, according to the newspaper.
Authorities said the men were allegedly driving a Hyundai Elantra, a completely different model from Anderson’s car. What’s worse, the complaint notes that the recorded license plates of the suspected thieves didn’t match Anderson’s. Also, no women were believed to have been with the suspects.
“The only thing Anderson had in common with the thieves is that she is also African-American,” according to the suit, filed by Anderson’s attorney Mark Thomsen. “Had Anderson been white this would not have happened.”
The lawsuit names the City of Glendale, officer William Schieffer and Detective Adam Wall as defendants.
Glendale Police have since apologized to Anderson’s father for the incident and paid to replace her busted window. The young woman was left to pay for the dents in her car, however.
Anderson says she hopes her complaint while prevent other people from experiencing what she went through.
This is something that I see all the time, everywhere, that African-Americans are being stopped for no reason and police officers aren’t being held accountable for the situations when they are wrong,” she told the Journal Sentinel. “I just want it to stop. I just want them to know this is not OK.”
