Police fined a Michigan woman $385 after a neighbor called 911 and reported the woman for talking too loudly on her cell phone outside.
Diamond Robinson believes that her white neighbor targeted her because Robinson is Black. On Thursday afternoon, she was walking up and down her street in Eastpointe, Michigan, when her neighbor asked her to end her call or talk in a softer voice, Fox 2 Detroit reports. Robinson told her neighbor—who recently moved to the area—to “get out my face” and kept her phone conversation going. That’s when the neighbor called 911.
Three minutes later, the police showed up and Robinson began recording the encounter on Facebook Live. “And I hope you know this is all being recorded,” Robinson told the officers in the video. “I’m not doing anything wrong by walking up and down the street talking on my phone.”
Regardless, the cops still wrote Robinson a $385 ticket for public nuisance. “You can’t tell me that I’m not being harassed, because baby I am … I’ve been living in Eastpointe for five years and I know what public nuisance is,” she said.
Robinson is now installing security cameras outside her home and is looking to fight the ticket in court. “A lot of these things are being pushed under the rug and they don’t need to,” she told Fox 2. “We can sit here all day and we can chant, we can riot, and we can do all of those things. That is not going to make a change if you don’t speak up at that time, at that moment.”
The neighbor only provided a short comment on the incident, telling the outlet that the ticket “speaks for itself.” When asked about the fine, police told Fox 2, “She will have her day in court.”
