‘We Just Looked Suspicious’: Someone Called 911 After Spotting Two Black Teenagers Waiting for an Uber In a Long Island Neighborhood, Sparking Outrage and Demands for Change
Faith Welch is a star student at Greenport High School in the Town of Southold on Long Island, New York. A regular on the honor roll, she’s the student council president, a cheerleader and a cadet in the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps). As a junior this year, she played Fiona in the school’s production of Shrek, while leading its African American Studies club, which she founded.
Welch is also a community activist dedicated to researching and documenting African American history and the legacy of slavery on Long Island’s North Fork. She has helped to organize the Village of Greenport’s Juneteenth celebration the last two years, and was scheduled to appear at a town board meeting on June 26 to promote the third annual event happening that week.
But Welch walked into that town meeting with more than promoting history on her mind.
Two weeks earlier, she and her boyfriend Jon Luc Johnson, a cellist and student at The Juilliard School for performing arts, were riding in an Uber headed to the Strawberry Festival in nearby Mattituck (where she was one of five young women vying for the title of queen) when a Southhold police officer pulled the car over.
The two Black teenagers were stunned to learn that someone had alleged that they were acting suspiciously at a local grocery store a few minutes earlier. The Southold Police Chief, Steve Grattan, later stated that the caller reported Welch and Johnson were looking into cars, asking people for money, and entering and exiting stores, according to the Suffolk Times.
“We weren’t walking around, we weren’t bothering anyone, we were standing on the curb doing what anyone who scheduled an Uber would be doing: waiting,” Welch told her mostly white neighbors at a joint meeting of Southold Town and Greenport Village.
Welch said after the police officer who stopped them took their IDs and ran some scans, two other officers arrived, who acted kinder and apologized, “and said they understood how bad this looked.”
Later, her mother called the police department and was told that the officer who pulled them over had checked back with the 911 caller, “whose story had changed from we were going into cars to that we just looked suspicious,” Welch recounted.
“Let me be clear: That’s racial profiling. And it could have ended very differently. And for many Black and brown people across the country and in our own county, it has. … But the fear and the anger and the message it sends don’t just disappear. I’m here tonight because this incident is not isolated. It reflects a broader problem of perception where younger people of color are automatically seen as a threat even when doing the most normal things.”
Welch urged the town board, who serve as police commissioners for Southold Police, and all community members “to take racial profiling seriously, to ensure that false or biased 911 calls are not treated as unquestioned facts, to consider implementing systems of accountability for those who make baseless, racially motivated reports, to go back and ticket the caller for who put two teenagers in danger for nothing.”
“Stop letting things slide because you know their family, which is a common excuse used in our town and other small communities like ours,” Welch said. “Because while an apology from an officer is appreciated, it’s not enough. The people who make these calls should be held responsible, just like anyone else who files a false police report.”
Her speech provoked an emotional response from Southold Councilman Brian Mealy, a town board liaison to Southold’s Anti-Bias Task Force, who is Black.
“As a person of color who has been pulled over by our local police, in solidarity I share your experiences,” he said, recalling through tears how his father, who was a corrections officer, instructed him on how to survive such interactions.”
Mealy said the task force had met with Chief Grattan to discuss the incident, and that its members “were very, very upset to hear what happened to you” and had “grilled” the chief about the department’s traffic stop procedures, including what types of calls generate a stop, and how police handle general safety reports.
“If somebody said they saw something suspicious, you have to check that, but that does not negate that this was a bad call,” Mealy said, noting that he asked Chief Grattan “to investigate the caller to see if this has happened before. The way this person went about it was not the correct way and I just want to soundly reject that in our community. We don’t do that.”
Grattan told the Suffolk Times that no investigations were launched regarding the incident, but said that he had listened to the recorded 911 calls, read the reports, and interviewed the officers involved.
He said the officer who made the initial stop “realized relatively quickly that this was some sort of misunderstanding,” adding, “it was unfortunate that [Welch] had to experience this, but I do believe that our officers did a good job and handled the call properly.”
Grattan said that all police officers in Southold participate in annual racial profiling training and attend implicit and explicit bias training online.
“We need to make sure this doesn’t happen,” Greenport Village Mayor Kevin Stuessi told Welch at the meeting, after mentioning that local officials had nominated her for a Suffolk County youth award. “I know how much the chief cares about this issue, too. We all need to stand up.”
Speaking at the Juneteenth celebration two days later, Welch told the crowd gathered at Greenport’s Mitchell Park after the parade that the holiday “made me see myself. It made me ask hard questions about where I came from and what was stolen from us. But it also gave me something back. It gave me pride, it gave me purpose, and it gave me power.”
She said “being a young Black girl doing this kind of work in a place like this hasn’t been easy,” noting that she has been laughed at and shut out for talking too much about Black history, “always making things about race” and being “too activisty.”
She said about a year ago she “went through a cultural shift and stopped straightening my hair every day to fit into someone else’s idea of beauty. I started wearing my curls, my coils, my edges with pride. I started dressing in a way that reflected me, my culture, my identity. I began to carry myself differently.”
After digging through local archives, interviewing elders, and “reading names off of gravestones that had been ignored for generations,” she said, “I was telling the stories of Black people from the North Fork who were never supposed to be remembered” in multiple mediums, from the Suffolk Times to local radio stations to the African American Studies club at Greenport High School.
Her historical work and activism have won her several honors, including the national Princeton Prize in Race Relations, which came with a symposium on race at Princeton University in April and a $2,500 award, and being named a Schomburg Center Junior Scholar and given the chance to study on Saturdays for a year in Harlem “learning alongside other brilliant Black teens who love history, culture and justice like I do,” she said.
Welch told the Greenport Rotary Club, which chose her as its Student of the Month last November, that she aspires to become a lawyer, specializing in the representation of wrongfully convicted African Americans.
Referring to her encounter with the police, Welch told the supportive audience in Mitchell Park, “Despite all the accolades attached to my name, none of them shield me from being a target of this country’s deeply rooted culture of racism. … The fact that people feel empowered to make reckless, racially motivated calls that put innocent teens in danger, is not just unacceptable, it’s dangerous, and there must be accountability.”