“What’s unfortunate is I literally designed the shoes that are in this bag, and I’m being … searched,” Bembury said to the officers, after repeatedly making clear that he was complying and that the officers were making him nervous. The suit also cited a 2 October 2020 incident when the unit stopped Salehe Bembury, who was then vice-president of men’s footwear at Versace and was holding a Versace shopping bag.īody-camera footage from that incident shows officers followed him and stopped him for jaywalking, with one saying, “How come you did that? You didn’t want to wait for the light?” The officers immediately asked for his ID, asked if he had weapons on him and then proceeded to pat him down and search him.

The couple “peacefully” objected to the officers “abusing their police powers” and were subsequently handcuffed and arrested on “multiple fabricated charges”, the complaint said, adding that prosecutors later dropped the charges. They had been riding a scooter when police detained them “without any reasonable suspicion or probable cause”, lawyers wrote, saying officers demanded their IDs to run their names through a criminal database even though they hadn’t committed a crime. The plaintiffs in the suit, which was filed as a class action, are Jasmine Williams and Khalil White, a couple on vacation in Beverly Hills last September. The unit, also known as the Rodeo Drive taskforce, was set up last year in response to “a significant increase in calls for service in our business community”, according to the city, which is one of the richest municipalities in the US and less than 2% Black. Between March 2020 and July 2021, the unit unjustly stopped and arrested Black civilians who were roller skating, scootering, driving and jaywalking a few feet outside the crosswalk, the suit said. The complaint, filed Tuesday by the prominent civil rights lawyer Benjamin Crump, alleges that out of 106 people arrested by a Beverly Hills police “safe streets” taskforce, 105 were Black and one was a dark-skinned Latino person. Nearly all the people arrested by a Beverly Hills police taskforce over the past year were Black, according to a new lawsuit which alleges egregious racial profiling in the wealthy California city.

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