Two comedians are suing for alleged racial profiling as part of an Atlanta airport’s drug search program.
Lawyers for comedians Eric Andre and Clayton English filed a 45-page lawsuit on Tuesday stating that Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport’s police program violates the constitutional rights of passengers, particularly black passengers, by subjecting them to illegal and coerced searches.
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The lawsuit names Clayton County, four county police officers and the chief, and a district attorney’s investigator as defendants.
The “jet bridge interdiction program” allows police to stop people who have already gone through extensive security screenings and are waiting to board their plane in order to search them for drugs, the lawsuit said.
“Its stops and searches are coercive, not consensual,” the lawsuit states. “Its target selections are unsupported by any legitimate cause or suspicion.”
The comedians were stopped approximately six months apart, with English being stopped in October 2020 and Andre in April 2021, because they were black, per the lawsuit.
They were asked questions relating to drugs while other passengers “gawked.” The lawsuit referred to the experience as “traumatizing, degrading, and humiliating.” Both told officers they did not have illegal drugs, and after the searches, they were allowed on to their respective flights.
Barry Friedman, one of the lawyers to file the lawsuit, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that this lawsuit aims to vindicate the violated rights of “hundreds, if not more, passengers.”
Friedman, who is also a co-founder of the NYU School of Law Policing Project, said the project is particularly concerned about programs, such as the one in Clayton County, that operate without any rules and give police a “great deal of discretion.”
“And when they have discretion, we often get discrimination, just like we see here,” he said.
From September 2020 to April 2021, the program conducted 378 stops. Of those stops, 56% of targets were black, according to Clayton County Police Department records cited by the lawsuit.
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“Given that only 8% of American airline passengers are Black (and given that the Atlanta Airport fairly represents that population), the probability of this happening randomly is staggering: significantly less than one in one hundred trillion,” the lawsuit states.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Clayton County Police Department for comment.
