TAMPA, Fla. -- In the wake of ongoing conversations surrounding racism and police brutality, Tampa Bay Buccaneers starting cornerback Carlton Davis gave an account Wednesday of an encounter with law enforcement that he says, to this day, has made him fearful of police.
When Davis, who is African American, was 14 or 15 years old attending Miami Norland Senior High School, he, his brother and a few friends were pulled over by police officers and had guns drawn on them.
Davis said on Instagram that as the car was pulled over "we were bum-rushed with guns in our faces. It was just like guns in our faces and we had done nothing wrong. It was the fact that they had seen kids in the car and said that the car looked like a car that was involved in a crime."
Davis said he never received any more information as to why they were pulled over that day.
"What would have happened if we felt startled and made a sudden movement?" Davis said in the post. "The trigger could have been pulled, you know what I mean? It would have been another case of the police officer just saying, 'I was fearing for my life' because you moved."
A study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences found that black men and black youth face a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed during an encounter with law enforcement during their lifetimes. Those odds are 1 in 2,000 for men in general, according to the study.
Davis' mother is a correctional officer and had spent years instructing Davis on what to do should he encounter law enforcement, including not reaching for his phone, not making any sudden movements and not speaking out of turn. He carefully followed all of her instructions, but to this day he's still haunted by the experience.
"It was very traumatizing. It was so unexpected," Davis said after the post went live. "To kind of live on eggshells and have to be very cautious around your own community is not an ideal way to live. That definitely does something to your psyche as far as your everyday living and how you go about making your choices as far as going to the store or driving and when the police pops up, what are you doing and how are you driving? To have guns pointed at us at such an early age, it just kind of introduced us to the world a lot quicker than we wanted to."
The Stanford Open Policing Project, which analyzed 93 million traffic stops from 2001 to 2017, found that black drivers were 20% more likely to be pulled over by police than white drivers. The study also found that police were more likely to find drugs, guns or contraband in stops of white drivers, but black drivers were still searched 1.5 to two times as often.
"When you're being stopped, the first thing a cop sees is a black man and once they see that, anything they do is to intimidate you. For what reasons? I don't know. I don't know what they experienced or what happened, but I've been stopped by so many cops. And it honestly started when I started driving," Davis said.
"I can't say I've never ran into a good cop, but I can say that every time I got stopped, for one made-up traffic reason or another, I felt them trying to intimidate me through orders, through tone of voice. It was constant threats of, 'You could go to jail for this,' and it's like, 'Uh, why are you mentioning taking me to jail if I've done nothing wrong?'"
Today, at age 23, Davis is constantly on high alert when he sees lights flashing or hears sirens.
"You think it's for you every time," Davis said.
"For a guy of my skin tone and a guy of my physique, we're targeted a lot. That definitely weighs on us. It makes us feel some type of way about our own law enforcement, who's here to protect and serve us. To be [fearful] of the people you should look at as heroes -- it's something that's just kinda heartbreaking and it's something I feel strongly about. That's why I'm using my voice and using my platform to speak out."
Davis said he hopes sharing his experience can help other young black men who have had similar experiences and wanted to educate the public that racial biases do exist.
Davis, along with left tackle Donovan Smith, left guard Ali Marpet and safety D'Cota Dixon, met with Tampa community leaders -- Mayor Jane Castor, Tampa Police Chief Brian Dugans, judges, teachers and parents -- this week to take steps forward and discuss solutions. He said their Bucs Social Justice Program board, which he is a member of, believes that work needs to be done to build better relationships with local law enforcement, and that more needs to be done to hold officers accountable for their actions.
"A lot of what the problem is is just not knowing," Davis said. "It's not knowing or understanding black people, or never experiencing them, not knowing what to expect. If we can improve the relationships between our officers and black people through community relationships and holding them accountable for taking a life, then I definitely think that would be a step forward for us."