Two Black men working in Orchard Park, New York, became a target of a false police claim after they were accused of kidnapping.
Tyrell Johnson and his cousin Chris were at a home where they were doing repair work on July 9 when they were approached by an officer who said he was responding to a call of an elderly white male being kidnapped by four Black males.
“As I am at the top of my ladder, I see the police actually coming through the trees and that’s what made me actually pull my phone out and record because I don’t know why he’s coming through the trees for and I know he’s looking right at me,” said Johnson to WKBW.
The video has garnered over 1.6 million views on TikTok.
“We got a call about four Black males tying up an old man, kidnapping him,” said the officer in the video.
Johnson replied, “I don’t know nothing about that.”
The Black Buffalo contractor then told the Orchard Park officer that he could knock on the door. The two had a brief exchange and the officer could be heard telling Johnson that it was a swatting situation. Johnson then walks to the back of the house to get Chris, but he couldn’t hear him calling his name because he was wearing headphones.
“That’s when I went to try to get my partner to know what’s going on, which kind of upset me because he had those headphones going on. It wasn’t really too much of a bad situation. It could have been bad. That’s all I was getting at. It could have been horrible actually,” Johnson explained to WKBW.
Swatting is described as the act of making a prank call to emergency services in an attempt to bring a large number of police to a particular area or address.
The state of New York has been experiencing a recent rise in swatting calls. State assemblyman Scott Gray introduced bill A2977 in response to the spike, which would upgrade from a misdemeanor crime to a “class e” felony.
“People that make those phone calls, the…
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