Woman: Cops Didn't Believe I Owned BMW, Did This to Me

Kamilah Brock gives her first on-air interview
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 13, 2015 3:12 PM CDT

There's the racial-profiling term "driving while black," but in this case, it's more like "black while driving a BMW." Kamilah Brock—who was arrested last year and thrown into a New York City mental facility—is speaking out about her "frightening eight-day 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' ordeal," reports PIX11. According to a lawsuit filed by Brock, she pulled up to a Harlem traffic light in her Beemer on Sept. 12, 2014, when an officer walked up and asked why she didn't have her hands on the steering wheel, per the Huffington Post. "I said I was dancing, I am at a light," says Brock. "He asked me to get out of the car." She was taken into custody that day and freed without charges, Brock says, but things got worse when she arrived at a police substation the next day to pick up her 2003 BMW 325Ci.

"I just felt like from the moment I said I owned a BMW, I was looked at as a liar," she says. That's when police apparently put her in handcuffs and had her taken to Harlem Hospital. According to medical records, she was held at the hospital for eight days, injected with lithium and strong sedatives, and told she could only leave after denying three things: that President Obama followed her on Twitter, that she worked in banking, and that the BMW was hers (all of which she still says are true). The final insult, says Brock, was her $13,000 medical bill. But in its court filings, the city says she was "acting irrational, she spoke incoherently and inconsistently, and she ran into the middle of traffic on Eighth Ave.," the New York Daily News reported in July. (A restaurant says a "racist" receipt was just an inside joke.)

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