Additional reporting by Seleah Simone (@seleahsimone)
(AllHipHop News) When a Michigan State University’s College of Law professor presented research a few years back stating that African Americans were more likely to be wrongfully convicted, people let it ride with little attention.
The general consensus for people of color: “Yeah and so … what else is new,” especially if you are Black. Especially if you are an artist. Especially if you are a male.
You “must have done something wrong” if they said you did. Millennial R&B group Pretty Ricky’s Pleasure P can attest to this.
Last month, the singer/reality star was arrested at a local Checkers Drive-Thru in Miami Gardens, Florida, for allegedly starting a food fight.
Headlines abounded.
Yet, the singer tells AllHipHop.com that the reports of the story got it wrong.
“What the media do, instead of saying, ‘Damn, he was wrongfully arrested, here’s a man that’s wrongfully arrested, that’s not right,’ they make a big spectacle out of it,” Pleasure P told AllHipHop.com. “It’s weird.”
Pleasure P vowed his legal team would be taking action.
In Pleasure’s retelling of the story, he maintained he was wrongfully arrested by a cop whom he has had problems with in the past.
“There’s a long line on one side, so I go to the opposite side. I tell the young lady, I say, ‘Hey, you think you can look out for me.’ Whatever, whatever, and I give her $60. You know what I mean? Like, just, you can keep the change, just whatever,” Pleasure P explained.
“She brought me back some things that I’d never heard of or whatever, so I was like, ‘You know, this is kind of not what I really wanted,’ [Again] so whatever. She was like, ‘Well, I ain’t going to put all this stuff into the … You can just to go the other line,” Pleasure P continued.
Pleasure P said things got messy as soon as he asked for his $60 back and attempted to return the bag of food to the drive-thru clerk.
The former “Love & Hip Hop Miami” star said the clerk threw the bag of food at her car, prompting him to exit his vehicle to ask another cashier for a refund.
According to Pleasure P, he calmly waited for the law to show up, but the situation only escalated when a cop he had a previous run-in with happened to be the responding officer.
“We had words a couple of times at a couple of other places,” Pleasure P explained. “As he comes, he’s like, ‘Take him.’ I’m like, ‘For what?’ [assault].’ How could I assault somebody through a drive-through window? I’m really trying to do the math. I’m like, ‘Well, why don’t you look at the cameras and stuff?’ Instead, he just took her word and whatever that the workers said. They were like, ‘Yeah, bye, you going to jail.’ ”
According to Pleasure P, he has more video of the incident, which he plans to use in court to beat the charge.