Your story reminds me that I watched a video last night on YouTube about a Black man who was stopped in the very early morning on his way to a local diner to get a french toast breakfast for his four children. He ended up being tased multiple times and having the holy crap beaten out of him by multiple cops.

It was all over a negligent case of mistaken identity. A couple officers were sitting in a parking lot running license plates at random. This guy's plate came back with a name that one of the officers called in verbally to dispatch. The dispatcher told the officer that the man had an old outstanding warrant for misdemeanor domestic assault. So they pulled him over.

He was immediately scared and defensive, explaining to the officers that he had four children waiting at home alone while he dashed out to pick up his food order.

They asked for his ID, which he immediately provided.

Then they didn't run it.

So they didn't find out he wasn't the guy with the warrant, that he had no criminal record, that he'd never been arrested or charged with anything.

They didn't know that, because they didn't bother to check. At that point, he explained that he had a pistol in his pocket, which he had a concealed carry permit for. That was true. He legally owned the pistol, and he was legally carrying it with a legal permit. He knew what his disclosure requirements were, and he carried them out to the letter.

Then he kept asking for an explanation for why he was being detained, which the cops refused to provide, eventually forcing him from the car and brutalizing him.

During that process, many other cops showed up on the scene, and several of them started shouting, "gun gun gun," at which point the beating became far more intense.

The expressions on their faces, their outrage and disdain for him, were raw and frightening in the video. He kept crying out in pain, asking for help, and asking for somebody to please go take care of his babies.

Nobody listened. Those cops treated him like an animal.

Clearly, some of them were just personally outraged that a Black man was carrying a gun. None of them, not not one cop, exercised the smallest bit of professional restraint or responsibility. Nobody tried to de-escalate.

At any time during the encounter, any one of those cops could have said, we're showing a warrant on you, and he could have explained that that was an error and ask them to run his ID again.

But that never happened. Those cops wouldn't treat him with even that basic dignity. They chose to treat him like an animal instead.

Eventually, after he was tased, beaten, handcuffed and immobilized, one of the cops went to the computer in her cruiser and ran the guys driver's license.

"Oh, fuck," she said to herself while caught on camera. "We got the wrong guy. Now what do we do?"

What they did was charge him with felony resisting arrest and put him through a year of criminal procedures before the district attorney finally dismissed the case.

None of the officers have been disciplined.

The man has now filed a federal lawsuit, and the cops were forced to provide body cam footage, which is how I saw the video.

Sadly, this isn't the kind of a case that's going to make the news. Nobody died, and nobody was actually badly hurt. This guy's life was destroyed, though. He lost his security-guard job over the charges, nobody else would hire him, and he lost his kids for a while.

It seems like that's cop reality for Black people in the United States today.