Black NYT Writer Blasts Yale Police After Son Held at Gunpoint

New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow criticized Yale University police for holding his son at gunpoint after mistaking him for a black burglary suspect.

Blow’s son, a third-year student at the Ivy League school in New Haven, Connecticut, was stopped Saturday evening after leaving the campus library, the writer said in an op-ed piece in the Times. The officer brandished a gun and made Blow’s son lie on the ground before asking for identification or telling him why he was being detained, Blow wrote.

“When I spoke to my son, he was shaken up. I, however, was fuming,” Blow wrote.

The incident shows that elite schools aren’t immune to overzealous police action in incidents involving race that is prevalent in American society. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be subject to traffic and pedestrian stops by police than are whites, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Profiling of Muslim Americans has also increased since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Campus police responded to an emergency call at Yale’s Trumbull College after students reported a man entering dorm rooms pretending to look for someone, a ruse for past burglaries on campus, Yale said in a statement. Students described the suspect as a tall, African-American, college-aged student wearing a black jacket and a red and white hat.

“During the efforts to locate and detain the suspect, a Yale College student, who closely matched the description of the suspect, was briefly detained and released by Yale police,” spokesman Tom Conroy said in the statement. The real suspect was later caught and will be charged with felony burglary, he said.

The dean of Yale’s undergraduate college and the campus police chief both apologized for the incident, Blow said. Yale police will conduct an internal review of the incident, Conroy said.

“This is the scenario I have always dreaded: my son at the wrong end of a gun barrel, face down on the concrete,” Blow wrote. “I had always dreaded the moment that we would share stories about encounters with the police in which our lives hung in the balance.”