On April 9, Amber Sherman was on her morning walk when she came across a “concerning” scene in the Orange Mound neighborhood of Memphis, Tennessee, she says. Cops had swarmed a house on Mount Vernon Road, and several police vehicles were parked in front.
There was an open can of a popular energy drink sitting on the roof of one of the cars. Sherman — a local activist who has been appointed to the city’s new police reform task force — felt something was off.
According to Sherman, the area had been a frequent target of ICE agents, who tend to hit homes in early morning raids. She told Atlanta Black Star she immediately pulled out her phone and started to film from the sidewalk. “I wanted to make sure that if it was ICE, I got the police interaction on video,” she said, adding, “It’s weird to be hopped up on energy drinks and doing a task force operation. That’s concerning.”
Within seconds, a high-pitched argument broke out between her and one officer, which she caught on video and uploaded to Facebook. But the events that morning quickly devolved into chaos. Sherman says she was arrested, threatened with mace, and detained for 17 hours before she was released on her own recognizance without receiving any formal paperwork — all because she dared to film police officers from a public right of way.
In her viral video, Sherman can be heard warning the residents inside the house not to open the door, shouting out, “Don’t open the door! Don’t listen to them!” This drew the ire of a police officer, who threatened to arrest her for being “loud.”
“He was telling me to stop making a scene, that I needed to stop talking. That if the neighbors complained, he was going to arrest me,” she recalled. Sherman, confident in her grasp of civic and constitutional law, can be heard countering to the officer that the local noise ordinance, is not in effect after 6 a.m.
“I just want to make sure [the residents of the house] knew their rights, which is you don’t have to let ICE police come into your home,” she explained.
“A lot of times, officers will have an arrest warrant but not a search warrant, but they’ll still search someone’s home, so I was telling them you don’t have to open the door” but rather talk through a window or step outside and close the door behind, Sherman claims. In fact, police can and will make forced entry to a dwelling to effectuate an arrest.
After the confrontation, Sherman continued with her jog down the street, during which she uploaded the video to Facebook, she said. Following her usual route, she hit the end of the block and returned the way she came. That’s when she decided to take a second video, zooming in from a distance on the police officer who threatened her “to make sure people knew who to look out for.”
“I was walking down the street, and I was zooming in on him. He turned around and was like, ‘Hey!’ and then he just charged at me,” she said.
Sherman said she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the highway, both misdemeanors, though she claims she was standing on the sidewalk and not obstructing anything.
“He didn’t read me my rights,” she recalled, adding that the officer pinned her arm behind her back during the arrest and ordered her to drop her phone or they would break it. The officer also threatened to “mace me in the face” if she didn’t cooperate, Sherman added.
According to a police affidavit later obtained by WREG, the unidentified woman at the house was wanted on felony warrants and was also arrested that day. Sherman told Atlanta Black Star that she did not know the woman or anyone else living there.
First taken to the local precinct and then shuffled to the jail, Sherman said she was detained for 17 hours before being released. The charges, however, have not been dropped, and she now has a lawyer. “I didn’t know this at the time, but #WheresAmber was trending on Facebook that day. People were asking where I was because I was missing for hours,” she said.
Videos, particularly bodycam footage, are an essential policing tool to ensure transparency and accountability. During the police operation earlier that morning, the cops informed Sherman they indeed had their body cameras turned on, to which she replied, “Good! Because you’re all some f**king liars.”
But after Sherman was taken to the precinct, she noticed the arresting police officer removed his body camera. “He sat it on the back of his car trunk and walked away to talk to other officers.” She believed he purposefully did that so his conversation wouldn’t be recorded.
Now at home with a court date looming, Sherman has received an outpouring of support from the community and is using her platform to demand that city leadership do better and reevaluate the policing tactics. On her social media, she called out Mayor Paul Young and MPD Chief CJ Davis, saying, “Paul Young, is this the type of leadership CJ Davis provides? Threatening citizens for being outside because they don’t like what we’re saying? Isn’t that my First Amendment right?”
“It’s important that people know they can film police no matter what,” she told Atlanta Black Star. “That even in a very small situation where I’m just filming someone, not approaching them, not attacking them. I’m literally just filming someone, they feel threatened by just being on camera,” she stated.
“The main reason I started filming is because police do act different when they’re on camera,” Sherman added.
