A convenience store owner in Miami Gardens, Fla., installed 16 cameras in his Quickstop a year ago. The aim was not to surveil shoppers, but rather the police repeatedly harassing the store's black workers.
One employee, 28-year-old Earl Sampson, has been stopped by cops 258 times in four years, searched more than 100 times and arrested 56 times. The most serious offense Sampson has ever been found to have committed throughout all these stops was low-level marijuana possession. He has even been stopped dozens of times by cops for "trespassing" in the store where he works. "I feel like I can't even be in my neighborhood," said Sampson.
The store's owner, Alex Saleh, told the Miami Herald that, on reviewing a year's worth of videos, he could see a strong pattern of racial profiling in the police stops. Saleh is now readying a federal civil rights lawsuit, which claims that police routinely engage in racial profiling and illegal stops and searches.
CBS obtained clips from the Quickstop of Sampson being stopped and searched:
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