A black Michigan woman was fined $385 for talking too loudly on her phone — and believes her white neighbor only called the cops on her because of her race, according to a new report.
Diamond Robinson was walking up and down her block on Cushing Street in Eastpointe Thursday, when a neighbor approached her asking, “Do you think that you can get off your phone or talk lower?” WJBK reported.
“One of those things she said,” Robinson said. “And I said, ‘Get out of my face,’ and I proceeded to walk past her. She is saying whatever she is saying. Three minutes later, Eastpointe police pulls up.”
Robinson said she began streaming the interaction on Facebook Live.
“And I hope you know this is all being recorded,” she told the officers in the video.
As she continued recording, authorities wrote her the ticket.
“I get a ticket for being a public nuisance because I’m talking too loud on my phone,” she said in the video. “That’s why I got a ticket?”
Robinson told the local outlet she plans to fight the ticket and is now having security cameras installed outside her home.
“There’s no way police should be called on me when I am on my own property, in my own neighborhood, on my own block,” she said.
Robinson believes she was targeted because she is black, according to the report.
The white woman who called the police had just moved to the neighborhood a couple weeks ago.
She said she felt broadcasting what happened on Facebook Live was her only choice.
“A lot of these things are being pushed under the rug and they don’t need to,” she said. “We can sit here all day and we can chant, we can riot, and we can do all of those things [but] that is not going to make a change if you don’t speak up at that time, at that moment.”
Robinson said she’d like to tell the 911 caller to leave her alone.
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SOURCE: New York Post – Amanda Woods
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