USA: Passer-by calls police on black man babysitting white children
When Corey Lewis left a fast food restaurant in the state of Georgia and headed to his car together with the two children whom he was babysitting, he was stopped by a woman whom he did not know. She asked him whether the children were all right and wanted to speak with them.
When Lewis refused to let her speak to the children, the woman followed Lewis and called the police on him. The children he was babysitting were white; Lewis is black.
The BBC reports that the incident in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia has once again stirred up debate about racial profiling in the USA. Lewis began to record the woman’s behavior towards him using his mobile phone and published the footage on Facebook, where one of the recordings has been seen more than 700 000 times.
“This lady is following me… because I got two kids in the back seat that does not look like me,” Lewis said in one of the videos. According to him, when the children saw the unknown woman was following them, they became afraid.
In the final video, Lewis is stopped by a police officer, who asks him what is going on. Lewis said he believes the only reason the woman called the police was his skin color.
Lewis’s video recordings have sparked many reactions of indignation, with people commenting online that it was “disgusting” and “terrifying” that the police were called on him. The officer reportedly cleared up what was happening very quickly.
The patrol officer called the children’s parents. They were out to dinner and did not comprehend what was going on.
At first the parents said they thought the call was a joke, the children’s father, David Parker, told The New York Times. “It just knocked us out of our chair. We felt horrible for Corey.”
The New York Times reported that Lewis is a friend of the family and is well known in the community for working with children through the business he owns, called “Inspired By Lewis“, through which he takes care of children five days a week as part of a youth mentoring program he created three years ago. At the time of the incident he was even wearing a t-shirt with his firm’s logo on it.
