Daniele Watts is an actress who played house slave CoCo in Django Unchained and is Martin Lawrence's daughter on the new FX comedy Partners.
But she and husband say she was mistaken for a different role. Watts says she was accosted by police on Thursday near Studio City, Calif., after engaging in some PDA (public display of affection) with her husband, Brian James Lucas. She refused to show them her ID, so they handcuffed her and put her in the back of a cop car.
"Today I was handcuffed and detained by 2 police officers from the Studio City Police Department after refusing to agree that I had done something wrong by showing affection, fully clothed, in a public place," she wrote in a post on Facebook.
"When the officer arrived, I was standing on the sidewalk by a tree. I was talking to my father on my cell phone. I knew that I had done nothing wrong, that I wasn't harming anyone, so I walked away."
"A few minutes later, I was still talking to my dad when 2 different police officers accosted me and forced me into handcuffs."
Her husband also took to Facebook to post about the incident, and he says he believes the officers thought she was a prostitute. "From the questions that he asked me as D was already on her phone with her dad, I could tell that whoever called on us (including the officers), saw a tatted RAWKer white boy and a hot bootie shorted black girl and thought we were a HO (prostitute) & a TRICK (client). This is something that happened to her and her father when she was 16. What an assumption to make!!!"
The officers eventually let her go.
In response to Watts' news-making post, on Sunday afternoon the LAPD released a statement on the incident, saying that the North Hollywood Division police officers were responding to a "a radio call of indecent exposure." The person who called said that "a male and a female were involved in indecent exposure inside a Silver Mercedes with the vehicle door open."
"The responding sergeant and police officers located two individuals that matched the description of the suspects, and they were briefly detained. Upon further investigation it was determined that no crime had been committed. Ms. Watts and her companion were subsequently released."
They have launched an internal complaint investigation.
Here's Watts' full post:
