A Black man in Philadelphia, questioned by police who said he looked suspicious after dropping his keys while standing on his doorstep around midnight last Thursday, has filed a racial profiling complaint with the Philadelphia Police Department, the mayor, and other city officials.
He also posted a door-camera video of the incident online, which has gone viral, garnering more than 56,000 views and 4,100 comments, most of them critical of how the officers treated him.
In the video, 38-year-old U.S. mail carrier Dennis L. Jones stands on his stoop with an ice cream cone in one hand and his keys in the other as two police officers step out of a patrol car parked in front of his house.
Doorbell Video Captures Cop’s Aggression
“You come off a little nervous, you alright?” says one officer, who is Black, while another officer, who appears to be white, stands and observes.
“Yeah, why would I be nervous?” Jones calmly replies, licking his ice cream.
The Black officer says he saw Jones drop his keys. Then he asks, “No guns or anything?”
Jones responds, “No,” and the Black officer approaches him and shines a flashlight towards a small black over-the-shoulder bag hanging by Jones’s side
“You mind smushing that real quick? Don’t need to open it,” the officer says, and Jones says he doesn’t want to smush his bag.
“It probably is a gun, but alright,” the Black officer says with a smirk, making eye contact with his partner. He steps back toward his patrol car and then reiterates to Jones that by dropping the keys, “You know how that looks — you look nervous.”
Jones turns toward his front door and unlocks it with a key as the video ends.
In a post later that day on Instagram, he wrote, “Situations like this makes you think of things can go left so dam fast. What if I’d matched the same energy they had? What if I said what I was thinking? All this over keys dropping? This can’t be life…but it is, & it gotta stop.”
Jones told Atlanta Black Star that he’s “a foodie” and had been out with friends that evening for dinner at Frame, a popular restaurant in Philadelphia’s historic Old City, and then had grabbed the cone on the way home at a local ice-cream shop.
He also shared another brief door cam video that shows him getting out of his friend’s car in front of his house, walking up the steps and dropping his keys just as the patrol car pulls up.
Other Distressing Encounters with Police
He said the Black officer racially profiled him because he “had done nothing wrong or suspicious.” He also noted that the encounter marked his second run-in with that officer and the third time Philadelphia police had stopped and questioned him “for no good reason, nothing even close to probable cause.”
A few months ago, Jones said, he sat in his parked Jeep Wrangler with the engine off.He was organizing a box filled with rubber ducks (which Jeep owners often present each other with as a fun ritual among strangers). A police sedan with four officers inside stopped and flashed a light inside his car. He said the same Black officer involved in last week’s encounter was sitting in the back seat and asked him what he was doing and if he had a gun.
New Jersey Cops Arrest Black Man in Hoodie, Admit They Pulled Him Over Because It Was ‘80 Degrees’
White Woman Calls Black People ‘Monkeys,’ Defends Slavery in Wild Wendy’s Rant,
“Are y’all for real? Are y’all serious?” Jones recalled answering after lowering his window.
“Yeah, we’re f—king serious,” the officer allegedly shouted, adding that Jones’s car windows were illegally tinted. “Are you going to obey the law?” he asked.
As Jones braced for a search, a car drove by and ran a red light in front of the police cruiser, “and they just pulled off and chased that person,” he said. “That encounter was very weird and awkward and disturbing to me.”
Walking to Buy Ice Turns Into Another Round of Police Questions
A third, earlier incident contributing to his sense that racial profiling is driving police conduct happened in November of 2024, when Jones was walking to a deli to get a bag of ice for a Taco Tuesday celebration at his house.
He said a Philadelphia police paddy wagon pulled up beside him and “an officer started questioning me, asking where I was going, why I was out, if I had a gun on me.” When Jones refused to stop walking, the paddy wagon drove along beside him, and a young officer continued peppering him with questions.
The officer “wasn’t speaking proper English for a professional at work,” said Jones. “He was like, ‘Yo, what’s up, my guy? What you doin’ out here?’ and I’m thinking, ‘How does me just walking down the sidewalk give them a reason or a right to do this?’”
Jones, a Philadelphia native, said he lives about four blocks from the notorious intersection of Kensington and Allegheny, a virtual open-air drug market near Port Richmond, his historically working-class Polish neighborhood that is lately undergoing gentrification.
“Maybe they think we’re all criminals, I don’t know,” he said. “But I am a law-abiding citizen. I have never been locked up. I have no criminal record. I follow all the rules. I’m a government employee. I work, I sometimes have a little fun in the city, and when I go home, and I don’t need to be harassed by police.”
While he owns a gun and holds a concealed-carry license, he said he rarely carries it and did not have it with him during any of the three occasions when police “randomly interrogated” him.
Complaint Asks for Police Investigation and Better Training
In a letter that he sent to the Philadelphia Police Department and its Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel, Mayor Cherelle Parker, the city council, and local news stations, Jones described his encounter with the two officers on June 11 as distressing and humiliating, leaving him feeling “embarrassed” and “ashamed.”
“Despite the fact that I was simply returning to my residence, I was treated as a criminal rather than a citizen coming home at the end of the night,” he wrote. “I was immediately viewed with suspicion despite doing nothing wrong. … As an African American man, experiences such as this leave me feeling deeply saddened and discouraged. While I cannot know the officers’ intentions, being repeatedly viewed with suspicion despite being a law-abiding citizen creates the perception of racial profiling and has a profound emotional impact.”
He said this third encounter with what he described as Philadelphia police’s “unnecessary scrutiny” made him wonder, “What about me caused such immediate suspicion? Was it the way I looked? The color of my skin? The fact that I was walking up my steps at midnight being a black man?”
The experience is “particularly painful,” he wrote, because “I love Philadelphia. It is the city where I was born, raised, and continue to live and work. … I want to feel safe, respected, and valued in the community that I call home.”
He asked the department to investigate his claims and consider “appropriate corrective action and additional training if the investigation determines that the officers acted improperly.”
‘I’m a Law-Abiding Citizen’
Jones told Atlanta Black Star that he has worked for the U.S. Postal Service in the city for nearly 11 years, after other stints working in therapeutic and support roles with autistic children with behavioral issues and people with developmental disabilities.
On his Instagram page, he has numerous posts showing himself delivering mail in his truck and sorting mail with coworkers, set to upbeat music. He also regularly chronicles his adventures with friends at a variety of eateries in Philadelphia and other places, often wearing snappy fashions and sporting a smile.
“I’m just a peaceful, working-class guy who lives paycheck to paycheck like everybody else around here,” he said. “How I got this target on my back I can’t explain.”
He said he would like for the police department to apologize to him and for the officers involved “to face accountability. Also, they need a new training course. Because there’s no way Philly trained those cops to act like this.”
In response to Atlanta Black Star’s request for comment about the incident and the complaint filed by Jones, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Police Department wrote in an email, “We are aware of the complaint, and it’s an ongoing internal affairs investigation.”
