Photo: Courtesy of the Weinstein Company.Danièle Watts, the young actress who played a rookie police officer in Weeds and made her feature film debut as Coco in Django Unchained, claims that she was handcuffed and detained by police after showing affection with her husband in public.
The reason? Cops (allegedly) thought she was a prostitute.
Apparently, the sight of a black woman engaging in a little PDA with her husband, Brian James Lucas, in broad daylight was cause enough for two LAPD officers to demand Watts' ID and cuff her hands behind her back.
An LAPD public information officer told Variety that there was no record of the incident because Watts wasn't arrested or taken to the station. But, Watts, who plays Martin Lawrence’s daughter on the new FX comedy Partners, posted an image of the altercation on her Facebook page, along with details.
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"When the officer arrived, I was standing on the sidewalk by a tree," wrote Watts. "I was talking to my father on my cell phone. I knew that I had done nothing wrong, that I wasn’t harming anyone, so I walked away. A few minutes later, I was still talking to my dad when 2 different police officers accosted me and forced me into handcuffs."
"As I was sitting in the back of the police car," Watts wrote, "I remembered the countless times my father came home frustrated or humiliated by the cops when he had done nothing wrong."
Watts was released after officers were able to verify her identity, but that hardly undoes the indignity of being detained for no reason. The incident also brings to mind the 2009 arrest of scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. — who was detained by police after being accused of breaking into his own home — which sparked a debate on racial profiling by the police. (Variety)