Much of the story is utterly commonplace, as home burglar alarms get tripped all the time, and the police showing up is kind of the point. So what’s the problem here?

[Kazeem] Oyeneyin said a friend stayed over that night and tripped the alarm unknowingly when he left. Oyeneyin says he disengaged it and went back to sleep.

“I just laid back down and all I heard was somebody screaming downstairs,” he said. “So I grab my firearm because I don’t know what’s going on. And I run down the stairs and it’s a cop.”

“Hey come out with your hands up,” the officer yells from the door as Oyeneyin is still upstairs.

The good news is that the obvious concern, at the stage where cops confront a guy with a gun, isn’t the story, because it didn’t happen.

Oyeneyin tells the officer he has his firearm in his hand. The officer responds, “Drop the gun! Drop the gun,” and Oyeneyin immediately puts the weapon on the floor.

So what’s the story? What came next.

“Ok come out here. Come out for me,” the officer yells. Oyeneyin responds, “What you mean come on out? I got on my drawers!”

The incident continues to escalate as Oyeneyin is ordered to put his hands behind his back and get on his knees.

“We got a 4-4 alarm here. I got an open door. I’m trying to make sure,” the officer says to a seemingly exasperated Oyeneyin.

Oyeneyin is inside his own home, comfortably nestled on the good guy curve, and confused as to why these cops would rather put him down than hear him out.  At this point, some might argue that the cops are just doing their job, carefully checking to be sure that this fellow, who had a gun in a home where the alarm went off to alert the police to a burglary. If they didn’t show, they would be criticized. It they shot him, they would be indicted. And now they’re criticized for doing their job. They just can’t win.

You can’t blame Oyeneyin for being confused and angry.

The homeowner responds, “I just talked to the alarm people! I just talked to the alarm people!”

In our interview with Oyeneyin, he explained, “I’m confused why he’s still talking. He’s asking me if I have ID. I told him yeah. (I just want him to) identify me and get me out of here. I was like, I need a supervisor. I definitely need to see your supervisor because this ain’t right.”

When the alarm is mistakenly triggered, you get a call from central station to ask if it was false or the real deal. Oyeneyin spoke to the nice people at central station. He told them it was false. He gave them his code. That, if the system works as it’s supposed to, should be the end of the problem and everybody goes about their business, even if that’s going back to sleep

But there’s one additional factor that should have clued the cops into the fact that this is the extremely common situation of a false alarm.

On the tape, you see at least four other Raleigh police officers arrive on scene. With Oyeneyin in handcuffs, wearing just his underwear, he was escorted outside to a waiting police car.

On top of the norm of false alarms, of a homeowner ready, willing and able to show identification, you have a guy in his skivvies at 12:30 p.m., a time when many people are in bed [Edit *], asleep, at home. What are the chances a burglar broke into this home, stripped down to his skivvies at half past, and was otherwise compliant with the cops when they came in response to the burglar alarm?

And then the cops decide that the only way to address this scenario is to take the cuffed potential homeowner in his skivvies outside to the flashing patrol car so the neighbors can watch?

It has become a bit too easy to be critical of cops, even when the guy lives. Had they not taken Oyeneyin outside in his underwear, a needless act of obvious embarrassment, there would likely be nothing to talk about here beyond, maybe, a bit of excess caution by the police. And then comes the overhype the other direction:

“It’s a lot of stories like this that go untold,” said Raleigh community advocate Kerwin Pittman, executive Director of RREPS (Recidivism Reduction Education Program Services).

“There’s no reason this man should have been pulled out of his house, not asked for paper ID and it progressed that far. This man was criminalized, humiliated, stigmatized in his own home”

There is a good probability that the cops assumed too much from the fact that Oyeneyin was black. After all, what’s a black guy doing in a house where the alarm goes off at night? It’s not as if he could own a home, because, well, reasons. But then, this could serve as a teaching lesson about racial assumptions, not to mention people at home at night in their underwear, so as not to put another black homeowner through this humiliation. Instead, it gets “criminalized, humiliated, stigmatized in his own home.”

Oyeneyin deserves a really, but really, sincere apology, and probably a couple PBA cards should he get stopped for driving while black speeding. He was embarrassed in a way no one should be and without justification. But if the point of the story is to prevent cops from indulging racial assumptions and preventing a black homeowner from being humiliated, or worse if the next cop is a little more antsy about the gun in the homeowner’s hand, then we need to make far better use of these stories of error than serial hyperbole. Is the point to stop this sort of thing from happening, or use it to prove the awfulness of racist cops?

*[Edit] Yes, it was 12:30 in the afternoon, not at night. Telling time is hard, and I was clearly not up to the task. My bad.