A police officer walked up the driveway of a house in a Houston suburb, pushed a woman against the garage door, and shot her son in the chest when he got up to object. It was his own driveway. It was his own mother. Robbie Tolan is the nephew of a Major League Baseball player. The car was his. Bellaire, Texas, 31 December 2008, around two in the morning. Robbie Tolan, 23, and his cousin had just got home from a late trip out. An officer ran the plate and typed a digit wrong. The system returned the car as stolen. It was not. It was Robbie Tolan's car, parked in front of the house he lived in with his parents. Officers ordered the two young men to the ground in the front garden. Tolan's parents came out in their night clothes and told the police this was their house, their son, their car. Sergeant Jeffrey Cotton arrived. He took hold of Marian Tolan and pushed her against the garage door. Robbie, on the ground, pushed himself up to object to his mother being handled. Cotton shot him three times from about fifteen or twenty feet. One bullet went through his lung and lodged near his liver. He survived. The bullet is still in him. His baseball career — he had been a prospect in the Washington Nationals system — was over. Cotton was charged with aggravated assault. In 2010 a jury acquitted him. The civil case went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, which in 2014 ruled unanimously in Tolan's favour on qualified immunity — holding that the lower courts had improperly weighed the facts in the officer's favour. *Tolan v. Cotton* is now a standard citation. He was in his own driveway. His parents were on their own porch. His father is Bobby Tolan, who played in the World Series. None of it counted, because somebody typed a letter wrong and then a sergeant did not like being told whose house it was. Robbie Tolan was shot by a police officer in his own driveway after a mistaken license-plate entry led police to believe his car was stolen. When he tried to protect his mother, he was shot three times. He survived, but his baseball career was over. The officer was acquitted. His family was home. His car was his own. And one mistake changed his life forever. Read our book which confronts more stories like this that demand accountability, and help keep them from being erased savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…

He stepped outside a restaurant in Beverly Hills to put money in a parking meter. Six hours later Charles Belk was still in a cell, barefoot, having been handcuffed on the pavement in front of a crowd in his own neighbourhood. He is a film producer. He had done nothing. 22nd August 2014, during the Emmy weekend. Belk, 51, had been at a business dinner. He walked out to feed the meter. Police surrounded him, handcuffed him, took his shoes, and sat him on the kerb in front of the restaurant while people filmed on their phones. A bank had been robbed nearby. The description police were working from was a tall, bald Black man. Belk is tall and bald. That was the match. That was the entirety of the match. He was held for about six hours on suspicion of robbery before surveillance footage was reviewed and he was released without charge. His car was impounded. He had to post bail to get out, and it took days to get that back. He wrote about it afterwards, and the paragraph people quote is the one where he lists what he was doing: a business dinner, a parking meter, a pair of shoes taken off him on a public street. Here is the part worth your attention. Charles Belk produced films. He had a degree in engineering and an MBA. He was in a wealthy part of Los Angeles in a suit on a Friday night. None of that is a defence against a description that says tall, bald, Black, because that description is not a description. It is a category, and there were about a hundred thousand men in that county who fit it. Six hours, barefoot, for a parking meter.