San Jose cop followed black family home and held them at gunpoint for no reason: lawsuit

The police department here is facing new allegations of racial profiling, this time in a federal lawsuit filed by a black couple who claim that an officer pulled a gun on them and their young children for no reason as they pulled up in front of their Almaden Valley home.

The suit filed by Emmanuel Stephens and his wife, Jasmine Whitley comes amid national concerns about disparate treatment of blacks and other racial minorities by police that have erupted in protests when encounters with cops turned deadly in Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; and Baltimore. A University of Cincinnati police officer was indicted Wednesday on a murder charge in what a prosecutor called "a senseless, asinine shooting" of a black motorist during a minor traffic stop. It was the first time such a charge had been leveled against an officer in the city.

The San Jose lawsuit also follows an analysis by this newspaper of traffic-stop data collected by police last year that found significant racial disparities in the stops. Officers pulled over, searched, curb-sat, cuffed or otherwise detained blacks and Latinos at far higher percentages than their share of this city's population. Yet the stops seldom led to arrests or evidence of crimes.

"What happened to my clients happens all the time and is a real problem," said the couple's Walnut Creek lawyer, Paul B. Justi. "This type of police misconduct only gets attention when someone ends up dead, but this type of non-lethal harassment is much more widespread and also need to be brought to light and stopped."

The City Attorney's Office, which represents the police department, declined to comment Wednesday.

Police officials have denied any bias, saying the traffic-stop data reflect a focus on high-crime areas such as East San Jose, which is heavily Latino, in what is otherwise a relatively safe large city. But the city has set aside $125,000 for an independent consultant to study the data, and police leaders also have expressed an openness to special training programs.

The couple allege that Officer Alexander Keller followed Stephens as he drove home from picking up his 7-year-old daughter from school, then jumped out of his patrol car with his gun drawn when they arrived. According to the lawsuit, Keller then handcuffed Stephens and put him in the back of his patrol car, and threatened their 14-year-old, who emerged from the house, with Juvenile Hall if she went back in the house to get a cell phone to record the incident. They also claim officers searched the car without probable cause, and cited Whitley for possession of a small container of medical marijuana, even though she showed him proof she had a prescription. An officer who later arrived told the family that they had gotten a call about a "suspicious black man with a purple backpack," but Stephens did not have such a backpack and Keller could not have seen it, even if he did so from his patrol car, the suit said.

In May, a separate federal civil rights lawsuit seeking class-action status was filed by San Jose lawyer Nick Emanuelon behalf of Shauncey Burt, an African-American man who was stopped by San Jose police for minor traffic violations three times in five months. Each stop lasted at least 30 minutes, the suit contends, during which he was ordered to sit on the curb, and on one occasion, handcuffed, while officers searched his car. Yet the searches came up empty and Burt was given a traffic ticket only once. The city declined to comment.

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