MAYOR Sam Katz's honorary campaign co-chairman in the 2006 civic election said police humiliated him and potentially harmed his reputation after pulling him from his car at gunpoint at a downtown intersection on suspicion it was stolen.
VIDEO: Mistaken ID riles rapper
Robert Wilson, a local minister who's also known as Grammy-nominated Christian rapper Fresh I.E., said he and a 20-year-old man that he's mentoring were boxed in by stolen-auto officers at the intersection of Donald Street and Ellice Avenue as the two were returning from a trip to Polo Park Wednesday afternoon. Wilson said officers removed him from his car with guns drawn, had him empty his pockets and was placed in the rear of a police car while the other man was placed down on the ground and handcuffed.
'I can't read his mind.... I really do believe that some kind of racial thing was involved' -- Fresh I.E. on police actions earlier this week.
Despite repeated denials his Chrysler 300 was stolen, police simply laughed off Wilson's claims they had the wrong guy.
"I told them that I'm an artist and a minister in the city -- they laughed at me," he said in an interview Thursday.
Wilson said he was mortified at how police treated him.
"Here I am in the middle of traffic...everybody saw it. What if people got the wrong idea about me? I have a reputation to uphold," he said.
Police eventually gave into Wilson's repeated requests to look at his ID and insurance in the car.
It was only after they did that they admitted they had the wrong car.
"He said, 'We made a mistake, we typed in the wrong licence plate,' " Wilson said.
Wilson, a black man, said he's baffled by the entire situation and believes he's the victim of racial profiling by police.
"If I was driving crazy and acting suspicious, I could understand it... (but) if it was an old, senior-citizen white couple, they wouldn't jump out and pull guns on them," he said.
Police would say little about the incident other than it had been turned over for review by police Chief Keith McCaskill's office.
A police spokesman was quoted in media reports as denying any allegations of racial profiling.
Given the well-documented escape-at-all-costs mentality displayed by many car thieves toward police in recent months, it's not unusual for them to take all precautions when approaching a stolen vehicle.
However, it's not known how an erroneous licence plate number entered into a police computer would turn up the same make and model of car owned by Wilson.
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