Former MLB Player Doug Glanville Says He Was Racially Profiled In His Driveway

Doug Glanville, former MLB player and current ESPN analyst, wrote in The Atlantic “I was racially profiled in my own driveway.”

Glanville spent 9 seasons in the majors and goes into great detail about how the incident affected him and his family. He describes how, one day this winter, he went to shovel his driveway at his home in Hartford, Conn. He said a police officer from West Hartford pulled up across the street and began walking in his direction; Glanville thought it strange he was in Hartford, which is a separate town with it’s own police force.

Glanville said the officer asked him “So, you trying to make a few extra bucks, shoveling people’s driveways around here?”

After persuading the officer he was indeed the homeowner, Glanville said he headed back to his vehicle. He offered no apology, just an empty encouragement to enjoy the shoveling.

Glanville wrote about the case of Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who was arrested for breaking into his own home in Cambridge, MA in 2009. That case brought the “beer summit” at the White House in 2009 bringing Gates, Sgt. James Crowley, Vice President Biden, and President Obama together in the Rose Garden Patio.

Glanville, author of the book The Game From Where I Stand also posted the article on dougglanville.com.

His wife sent a state senator, who happens to live two houses down from them, an email with the subject line “Shoveling While Black.”

It read “Doug just got detained by West Hartford Police in front of our house while shoveling our driveway, questioning him about asking to be paid for shoveling. The officer left when Doug told him that it was his house. There were several other people on our street in front of their houses shoveling snow at the same time. None of them were stopped for questioning. Just wanted to vent to someone whom we know cares and would be equally outraged.”

Glanville graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and his wife is an attorney who graduated from two Ivy League schools.

According to baseball-reference.com, Glanville made $11,540,000 in his nine-year career, retiring after the 2004 season.

He ends his article talking about the officer. “I wish he would sit down with my kids and answer their questions. That might help him understand how hard it is to be a father — let alone a father in a black family. And I’d like him to know how much my children — and all children — expect from the officers trained to protect them. At the end of all my conversations with my kids, there were many things they still didn’t understand. But my 5-year old son reassured me: “That’s okay, Dad. I still want to be a police officer.”

[Image via dougglanville.com]