Saturday Night Live alum Jay Pharoah has shared a video that was recently stopped by police while jogging in Los Angeles. The security camera footage, which was released on Friday, shows four officers stop Jay with their weapons in hand, ordering him to the ground before that one of the cops started kneeling on his neck. The incident occurred in April, a week before the news of the February, the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. In the Instagram clip, Jay spoke about what happened, saying: “I could as easily have been a Ahmaud Arbery, or a George Floyd.”
Jay also opened up about the encounter in an interview with CBS The Talk, which will air in its entirety on Monday, June 15. He detailed the experience, saying that he was first approached by an officer, who told him to go down. “Three more officers came up, he jumped out of the car immediately, guns blazing,” he said. “It’s hot, the crown is, without doubt, something to worry about, the police officers did not have gloves, I didn’t have in the masks. They said, ‘Get on the floor”. They told Me I fit the description of a Black man with gray sweatpants and a gray shirt. The officer, literally, just stared at my clothes and said to me, ‘You fit the description.’ When they put me in cuffs, after all they were in me, an officer put his knee on my neck . . . It was totally free. They don’t have to do that.”
The actor told the police to Google her name, saying: “you will see that you made a big mistake.” The officers then let Jay go after receiving a call confirming that the suspect had been arrested. “I was only trying to exercise,” said Jay. “It could have turned in another situation, if I was not who I am. And the point here is to be Black in the united states, is just that: to be Black in the united states. Other people can’t level with the same fears that I have. Get out of the house, we should not be afraid of going to the grocery store, going to get a bit of gas, running down the street. It’s called human civility. That is what it is. It’s about being a human being.”
