(CNN) — It’s every African-American parent’s nightmare: seeing your son being led away in handcuffs when you know he’s done nothing wrong. The surreal scene happened to me one recent morning.
While sitting in my backyard I heard adult male voices around the side of the house. I opened the gate and saw a white police officer handcuffing my 13-year-old son. The plainclothes Evanston, Illinois, officer and his partner did not identify themselves as police. They did not ask our son’s age or where he lived. They told him first to put his hands up and then handcuffed him. They assumed he was guilty, of what we didn’t know. His crime appeared to be that he was a black male.
