Cory Booker recalls police holding him at gunpoint as a college student
“It seemed like half the police force came out and they kept me, sitting in my car, screaming at me commands," he said.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) is speaking out about being held at gunpoint by a California police officer when he was a college student on the west coast.
In a new interview with Politico, Booker recalled his campus life at Stanford University, while living in the predominantly white Northern California city of Palo Alto. During this time as a youth, “the fear was at its highest,” he told the outlet and recounted the moment an officer accused him of stealing his own car.
“It seemed like half the police force came out and they kept me, sitting in my car, screaming at me commands,” he said. “And ultimately the only excuse they gave me was that I fit the description of somebody that they were looking for.”
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The Democratic lawmaker, who grew up in suburban New Jersey, said he had numerous racist encounters with police after his parents bought him a car. Booker previously spoke about this specific experience with law enforcement in remarks on the Senate floor last year following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Reading from a column he wrote as a student for Stanford’s newspaper, Booker said the officers told him, “Turn off the engine! Put your keys, driver’s license, registration and insurance on the hood now! Put your hands on the steering wheel and don’t even think of moving.”
“Five police cars. Six officers surrounded my car, guns ready,” he continued. “Thirty minutes I sat praying and shaking, only interrupted by the command, ‘I said, don’t move!’ ”
During his address, Booker also noted: “being followed by mall security guards, being accused or stopped, being looked at with suspicion, and experience after experience after experience with police.”
Booker’s comments come amid negotiations with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) on a police reform bill. As theGRIO reported, the legislation, which was first approved last summer but stalled in the Senate, was named in honor of Floyd, whose killing by police in Minnesota last Memorial Day sparked protests nationwide. The bill would ban chokeholds and “qualified immunity” for law enforcement and create national standards for policing in a bid to bolster accountability.
According to The Associated Press, House Democrats hustled in March to pass the most ambitious effort in decades to overhaul policing nationwide, able to avoid clashing with moderates in their own party who are wary of reigniting a debate they say hurt them during last fall’s election.
“My city is not an outlier, but rather an example of the inequalities our country has struggled with for centuries,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who represents the Minneapolis area near where Floyd died. She asked her colleagues if they would “have the moral courage to pursue justice and secure meaningful change?”
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was approved 220-212 on March 3.
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Democrats say they were determined to pass the bill a second time, to combat police brutality and institutional racism after the deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans following interactions with law enforcement — images of which were sometimes jarringly captured on video. Those killings drew a national and international outcry.
Scott, the only Black Republican in the chamber, previously noted that the legislation’s sticking points were qualified immunity and prosecutorial standards and that in both areas, “We have to protect individual officers.”
“That’s a red line for me,” Scott said, adding, “Hopefully we’ll come up with something that actually works.”
Despite month’s of talks, The Hill reports that lawmakers are not close to the deal.
“I think it’s June or bust,” Scott told reporters last week. “I think we have three weeks in June to get this done.”
Biden has tweeted that he hopes “to be able to sign into law a landmark police reform bill.”
*This story contains additional reporting from theGRIO’s Associated Press.
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