Michael Leo Owens, 45, is a political science professor at Emory University. He said he has family members who are police men and women. He made these comments in an interview with staff writer Rosalind Bentley. They have been edited for length and clarity.
Earlier this year I was out at Stone Mountain, exercising. Then a few days later my doorbell rang and it was a Stone Mountain police officer, from the park itself. White officer, probably in his late 50s, early 60s.
He asked whether he could come into my house and I was like, “No, you can’t come into my house. What is this about?”
It was completely bizarre. I would never let a police officer in my home. One, we know that there are these cases of people having stuff planted on them or in their houses. Two, once they’re inside, and it was just me, it’s totally my word against his. So we just had this nice little conversation, where he stayed outside and I kept my screen door cracked.
Long story short: the officer said someone saw a person who looked like me doing something. The details were never clear. I said, “What did that actually look like? I had on running gear. Could they describe that?”
And he said, “I can’t get into the details of the case.”
He was very polite, very respectful. He kept asking me where I was, whether I had any witness who could verify where I had been, all this strange stuff.
And it just sort of quickly dawned on me how immediate it could be for someone to, one, mistake you. And, two, I suspect that if I weren’t who I am, that it could have been a very different sort of scene at my house with this officer.
I’ll be honest. I pulled out the Emory card and said, “Hey, I’m an Emory professor. I don’t get caught up in stuff like this.”
I suspect he felt a certain amount of embarrassment or even shame that he was standing at the door of an Emory University professor talking about these sorts of things.
He left. But for days and weeks I had this sense of trauma about that experience. I wouldn’t even go back to the park for fear that I could be falsely identified or wrongly accused of something. It took many months for me to get over that and start going back to the park and to see that public space as my own public space, which I always thought about Stone Mountain Park.
It was this curious thing that an officer could just show up out of the blue. I was wondering, “Well, how do they even know where I live?” I guess someone must have gotten my license plate.
To this day it just troubles me. So, I can imagine what it’s like for many people to find themselves in these sorts of moments where there is this face-to-face interaction with law enforcement that one never imagined. Depending upon the personalities involved, depending upon the context, it could either end the way mine ended, which was nothing really except for the bitter trauma that I retained, or, it could have ended violently.
I don’t know, it felt like, in search of the Boogeyman, in some ways, and thankfully he didn’t find it at my door.
I’ve heard other African-American men express that they’ve had similar situations, but I’ve never had any of my white friends express that they’ve had these sorts of situations.
Police response
The Stone Mountain Park Police Department said in a statement this week that, in following up on a citizen’s allegation of criminal behavior at the park, police determined that Owens was the wrong person. The case is closed, police said.
