Ving Rhames says he opened his door two years ago and found a red dot on his forehead—from a 9mm police handgun. Three officers, a police dog, and the police captain were standing on his Santa Monica, Calif., doorstep at roughly 2:15pm that day. "And they say, 'Put up your hands.' Literally," the Mission Impossible actor said Friday on the Clay Cane Show on SiriusXM. "[An officer] said to me, 'A woman called 911 and said a large black man was breaking into the house. And so we came.'" Rhames apparently went across the street with the captain and an officer to talk to the neighbor, who denied making the call. But Santa Monica police backed up most of his story.
"We got a call from several neighbors indicating that they thought what they were looking at was a burglary in the home," Santa Monica Police Lieutenant Saul Rodriguez tells
People of the July 29, 2016, incident. "As soon as we discovered it was Mr. Rhames, we de-escalated immediately." Rodriguez says guns were raised because "burglaries can sometimes be violent." In 2017, his department created a city-wide program called Meet Your Neighbors (think block parties, ice cream socials, coffee dates) to help avoid such problems. But for Rhames, the incident left a mark: "What if it was my son and he had a video game remote or something, and you thought it was a gun?" says the Golden Globe winner. "Just like, I don’t know, Trayvon had a bag of Skittles."
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