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| Earl Sampson |
(Scroll down for video) A local Florida police department is under fire after it was caught arresting an innocent black man 62 times for trespassing in his own store.
The young black man has been arrested and questioned by police in Miami Gardens 258 times in four years.
Earl Sampson, 28, has been arrested sixty-two times for trespassing at 207 Quickstop, despite the fact that it is the convenience store where he works as an employee.
Owner Alex Saleh, 26, said that he has been looking for answers for the past year after he's seen Sampson, and other 207 Quickstop employees stopped and frisked every day by police in Miami Gardens.
Most of those arrested, including Sampson, are poor and black, Saleh said. Some have been arrested three times in the same day, Saleh said.
To help him figure out what was going on, Saleh has installed 15 video cameras in his store in June 2012. What the cameras produced raised troubling questions about the conduct of police in Miami Gardens.
The videos show police stopping people, aggressively searching them, arresting them for trespassing in places where their presence presented no violation.
The police were entering Saleh’s business without a warrant or authorization, and used what appeared to be excessive force on people who did not resist arrest.
Saleh and his lawyer, Steve Lopez, are preparing a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that the police department routinely directed officers to engage in racial profiling and illegal detention.