Along with fellow comedian Clayton English

American comics Eric André and Clayton English are suing police, claiming they were stopped and searched at Atlanta airport for no other reason that they are black.

André was stopped while boarding a plane to Los Angeles in April 2021, six months after, the same thing happened to English.

Now they have both filed a lawsuit claiming to be the targets of f racial profiling.

Andre told a press conference last week: ’Police officers came out of nowhere in like, almost like an ambush style and started, singled me out. I was the only person of colour on the jet bridge at the time

‘They singled me out. They asked me if I was selling drugs, transporting drugs, what kind of drugs I have on me. It was clearly racial profiling. The experience was humiliating and dehumanising, degrading.’

‘I was blocked in a jet bridge by two police officers who interrogated me about drugs. It’s hard to believe I was selected at ‘random’ for questioning. It was a humiliating and degrading experience."

At the time police described it as a ‘consensual encounter’ adding: ‘Mr Andre chose to speak with investigators during the initial encounter. Investigators identified that there was no reason to continue a conversation and therefore terminated the encounter.  Mr. Andre boarded the plane without being detained and continued on his travels.’

But the lawsuit says: ‘By ambushing passengers in this manner,  officers compound the enormous, preexisting compulsion to cooperate with airport law enforcement by exploiting the passengers’ fear they will create an untoward scene or will appear guilty, subversive, or dangerous to their fellow passengers. By design, all of these factors exert tremendous coercive pressure on an individual passenger on the jet bridge to acquiesce to the officers’ wishes. Those pressures are even greater for persons of colour, given the history of racial profiling by airport security officers.’

The lawsuit is against the Clayton County Police Department which covers the airport, and several named individuals, and states that 56 per cent of people stopped and searched on the air bridges are black. Only 8 per cent of US airline passengers are black.

Barry Friedman, co-founder of the Policing Project at NYU School of Law said: ‘These are cases of flying while black, plain and simple.

‘Every day in America, people of colour are unjustly stopped on the pretence that these encounters are consensual. It is humiliating, it is deeply inappropriate, it is unconstitutional, and it must stop.’

It is said that out of 402 jet bridge stops from August 2020 to April 2021, only three drug seizures were made but around $1million was taken under ‘civil asset forfeiture’ – which allows police to seize property they believe is connected to a crime. Critics have criticised the process as a legal way for police to steal from civilians, who find it hard to get their possessions back.

The comedians' lawyer said the police operation was ‘organised largely in order to seize money from people, on the hope that they’re not going to thereafter make the claim for those funds’.

André and English are asking the federal court to declare the jet bridge stop programme at Atlanta airport unconstitutional.

André is pictured above at the press conference with two of his lawyers. Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Richard Deane Jr. Picture from the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, which is backing the comedians’ case.

Published: 16 Oct 2022