The "Django Unchained" actress accused of having public sex with her boyfriend says she refused to give into a police request for identification because she was racially profiled as a teenager.
"Some experiences stay with us. When I was 16, my father was driving me home from a school play when we saw flashing lights. We hadn't been speeding," Daniele Watts wrote in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times published on Saturday. "I remember my father asking the police officer what was wrong. The officer ignored his question and demanded information."
Watts made headlines in September after her run-in with the police went awry.
In her Los Angeles Times column, Watts says the incident during her teenage years left her father "disturbed."
"As we drove off, I asked my dad why he had given up his license when he had done nothing wrong," she wrote. "He gently explained to me what so many African Americans of his generation know too well: 'You don't want to mess with the police. They can judge you unfairly and make life very hard.'"
Watts went on to describe several more times in which she was stopped by the police, ending with her most recent incident involving her boyfriend, Brian James Lucas, on September 11.
"I was standing on the grass near a public sidewalk when a Los Angles Police Department officer approached Brian," she wrote. "He said he had received a call about a couple engaged in lewd conduct and asked for our IDs. A few minutes before, Brian and I had been making out in his car; I was sitting on his lap. We were not having sex, and both of us had our clothes on."
After asking and answering a number of questions about her own actions during the stop — and about racial profiling in America — Watts asked, "If I had nothing to hide, why didn't I just hand over my identification?"
She answered, "But in saving myself time and pain, I would have lost something far more valuable: my right as an American to limit intrusions by police. … California law does not require you to produce identification simply because a police officer demands it."
Watts also warned against being submissive to police and allowing them to abuse their authority.
"I objected — and I continue to object — because if we are unclear about our rights, and we continue to believe that in every case when a police officer tells you to do something, you have to do it, as I was told, we allow the police to abuse their power."
Watts concluded her piece: "We have rights because people throughout history struggled and even died to secure them. If I had handed over my ID, I would have denied their efforts. And I would have turned my back on the 16-year-old who watched her father endure an unfair and humiliating stop by police."
The officers involved in the detainment are under investigation by the LAPD's internal affairs department.
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