Handcuffed, Humiliated and Totally Innocent

There was nothing in his background that could have prepared Dr. Angelo Gousse for what happened that night.

Nothing in his privileged childhood, as the son of a wealthy physician in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Nothing in his academic career, which led him to the top of his class at Yale Medical School. Nothing in his professional life, as a nationally known surgeon in Miami.

But there he was on the night of Feb. 11, spread-eagled and handcuffed on the ground, alongside the Santa Monica Freeway, surrounded by a half-dozen LAPD patrol cars.

“I kept asking what I’d done, kept telling them that I was a physician, from out of town. . . and could they please tell me what was going on. But it was like talking to the pavement. No one would listen to me.”

Gousse had been in town to speak at a UCLA conference when he was arrested as a suspected car thief. The rental car he was driving had been erroneously reported stolen six months before.

The doctor did not know that, of course. He was merely trying to find his way back to his hotel when, suddenly, he was surrounded by flashing lights and ordered out of his car by commands boomed from a loudspeaker. He lay face down on the ground, as instructed, while police cuffed his hands behind his back. The Santa Monica Freeway was cordoned off and a helicopter buzzing overhead held him in its beam.

Police searched the car for contraband, but all they found was his briefcase in the back seat, containing notes from his speech and medical slides.

Gousse spent four hours in police custody, he says. Much of that time he was locked in a patrol car, his hands shackled behind him. The rest he spent in a cell. Finally, police realized that a mistake by the car rental agency had landed Gousse’s rented car on the stolen list.

They didn’t tell Gousse that, though. Just unlocked the cell door and confirmed what he already knew: You didn’t steal the car, so you’re free to go.

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In Florida, accounts of Gousse’s ordeal made news. Newspapers reported his arrest by the “embattled” LAPD and noted that “the officers involved in the incident are assigned to the Rampart Division, which has been under fire . . . with allegations of police corruption.”

His friends found it hard to believe that this soft-spoken, serious man could be treated so callously. And Gousse found it hard to accept that the anvil of racial profiling had fallen, this time, on his head.

“Many of my white colleagues said if they were stopped and they showed the police their credentials, that they were professionals . . . that would have been the end of it and they would have gone on their way. But it is different for me, because I am black. I didn’t want to believe that, but I have heard it enough now to realize it must be true.”

He speaks with the tone of a man burning not with outrage but with shame. “The helicopter, the spotlight, the screaming, ‘Lay down on the ground! Put your hands up!’ It was terrifying,” he says.

“It is embarrassing even to talk about it,” he says, “to have to explain to my 10-year-old son that daddy was arrested, even though he knows I have never broken the law.”

He keeps replaying that night in his head. Police wouldn’t tell him what he was being arrested for, he said. “I did everything I could think of to convince them I had done nothing wrong. I showed them my medical license. The officer looked at it with his flashlight, to see if it was true. They were searching the car, and I told them to look in the glove compartment, where I had my rental [car] documents, all in order.”

But he realized, as they locked him into a patrol car headed for jail, that none of that had made a difference--”that once they knew I was an African American man, I had no defense, no way to explain that it was a mistake.

“They were not going to think, ‘Let us reconsider this. There might be another explanation.’ To them, there was no other possibility. I must be a criminal.”

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Gousse returned to Los Angeles last week and held a news conference to announce that he has filed a claim against the LAPD. He told reporters he believes his arrest was racially motivated and accused officers of handcuffing him so tightly that he suffered nerve damage--damage he fears may be permanent and which has left him unable to perform surgery, to drive or even button his shirt.

The LAPD is already the subject of two federal lawsuits alleging racial profiling, the practice of targeting minorities for vehicular stops or arrests. One is by a group of five men who told stories similar to Gousse’s; another is by a black judge from Virginia who said she was forced to lie on hot asphalt in Venice for 30 minutes after being stopped by LAPD officers.

LAPD officials deny that Gousse’s arrest was the result of racial profiling. After all, if police spot a stolen car, they are duty-bound to stop it and investigate its driver.

“But this case could have been cleared up right there” with a call to the car rental agency, said Gousse’s Los Angeles attorney, Browne Greene. Instead, the LAPD “made this thing into John Dillinger. There was absolutely no attempt to listen to his side of things. They were not out to believe this black guy was anything other than a car thief.”

Until now, Gousse had considered racial profiling an abstraction. “We all know about discrimination . . . and there’s always room for suspicion when you’re talking about racial issues,” he said. “Very few are clear-cut. No one will ever admit, ‘We didn’t hire you because you were black,’ or, ‘We arrested you because you were black.’ ”

Maybe something other than race colored the officers’ perceptions of Gousse, and allowed the presumption of guilt to override every bit of information he tried to present. Maybe it was simply the kind of cynicism that allows police officers to survive on the city’s dangerous streets. But how then, do you explain this:

“Do you know,” Gousse said, “when they let me go, they never explained what had happened, about the mistake. They never even apologized. ‘I’m sorry.’ I thought that was the least they would say.”

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Fridays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.