A man in the Cincinnati-area has filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the local police department and a grocery store, alleging he was illegally detained. Eric Lindsay, a Black man in his 60s, was accused of shoplifting at a West Chester Meijer, even though employees at Meijer told police that the shoplifting suspect was a white man in his 30s, the suit says. Body-camera footage showed police telling Lindsay to take his hands out of his jacket pockets as they approached him and accused him of concealing items in the jacket, according to the lawsuit. A cop and the store’s manager later admitted it was all a big mistake, the suit reads. Lindsay says the “unconstitutional detention” left him feeling humiliated and embarrassed. “In the same being as so many national instances where African-Americans have been confronted by law enforcement for engaging in their daily lives and doing nothing illegal, this case is about the unsupportable and illegal profiling, detention, accusing, and interrogation of an African American customer by police officers and the complicit actions of the retail store where it occurred,” Lindsay’s lawsuit reads.
