A Black driver stopped on the side of the road to clean out his vehicle on Saturday morning when he was approached by two white men, one of whom was carrying a gun.
Darnell Smith said he’d just dropped off his last Uber passengers around 2 a.m. in Milwaukee when all of sudden he was confronted by a man and his brother wanting to know what he was doing.
(photo credit: WISN screenshot)
“They didn’t know me. I did nothing wrong. They couldn’t tell me what alarmed them. Was it my sweater? Was it my glasses? Was it the color of my skin? What was it?” Smith told WISN 12.
The Uber driver captured the entire incident on camera as one of the men drew a gun at his face. As the men demanded to know why Smith was in their neighbor, the driver responds back in the recording, “I have no obligation to tell you s**t. Nothing. You didn’t even tell me who you were when you pulled up. For all I know, you were trying to rob me.”
Todd Sincock, said he and his brother confronted Smith because they assumed he was dealing drugs in their area.
“We don’t want the drug activity. We don’t want it on our block,” the white resident said.
Sincock said his brother is a concealed carry permit holder and he and his brother were just trying to scare Smith off. He said the area has a lot of drug activity.
“Every now and then, there’s cars that’ll park on this block, and you can tell they’re in their car doing drugs,” said Sincock. “And that’s kinda what we thought it was.”
Both Smith and Sincock called Milwaukee Police. However, the officers let Sincock and his brother off the hook and arrested neither party.
The Uber driver said the incident definitely stemmed from racial profiling, but he also blamed it on Wisconsin’s concealed carry law.
“Just because you have a conceal and carry license doesn’t mean pull your gun out if you think something is happening,” said Smith.
