Trigger Warning: The article mentions gun violence and details of injustice towards people of color.
Negligence and false crime stories are two sides of the same coin. One stems out of the other. Maybe people of color know about this much more than others. In 2021, Albert Jackson Jr., a Black father from Florida, and his 14-year-old son were falsely accused of robbing a bank and detained at gunpoint.
One of Jackson’s neighbors, Paula Thompson Rappe, allegedly told another neighbor, George Guthrie III, that Jackson matched the description of the bank robber even though he had been on his roof with his son during the scene.
Last month, Jackson was suddenly arrested while trying to show a video of the incident to Escambia County Commissioners. At an October 16 commission meeting, Jackson attempted to play the video from a USB drive.
Read “‘Don’t Touch Me!’: Black Man Falsely Accused of Battering Woman at County Meeting While Trying to Show Video of Cops Wrongfully Detaining Him and Son for Bank Robbery” on SmartNews: https://t.co/nK0w7hKRhx
— #primalscreamgrammy (@mary_swilling) November 3, 2025
Still, Escambia Strategic Communications Director Kaycee Lagarde tried to take it from him. He said he only touched her arm to prevent the USB from being removed, but she claimed he “aggressively grabbed” her and felt scared. Video of the interaction shows the contact appeared minor.
“Please don’t touch me,” said Escambia Strategic Communications Director Kaycee Lagarde. She reportedly wanted to check the content in the USB drive that was presented to the commission in case it was “graphic.”
As per Atlanta Black Star, Jackson told the commission, “I have a right to speak, and I have a right to show this information. This is my 14-year-old son, and I was accused of bank robbery.” Despite the explanation, Albert Jackson Jr., a deputy, asked him to step outside and demanded identification.
As the poor fellow questioned them, asking what crime he had committed, the deputy eventually cited “battery,” leading to his arrest. Jackson believes Lagarde had him arrested to prevent the video from being shown. For the unversed, in criminal law, the term battery is described as “any physical act that results in harm or offence to another person without their consent”.
Meanwhile, the video Jackson wanted to share shows him and his son handcuffed in patrol cars, suffering heat exhaustion and distress after being falsely accused by neighbors of committing a bank robbery. Alas, the real robber allegedly looked nothing like Jackson. He was a 200-pound Hispanic man with a wig who attacked a bank employee and stole $5,000.
As per the outlet, Jackson spent years gathering evidence from the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office to prove the wrongful detainment. He’s now set to represent himself with a lengthy argument in a 62-page lawsuit against the neighbors and others involved in the fake case.
He is confident he can beat the new charges, which would allow him to continue pursuing justice. As reported by the Death Penalty Information Center, the disparity in crime cases is worse when the murder victim is white. Black people suffer unnecessarily, even if the gravity of a crime isn’t much.
Justify all one wants to, but the law has never been fair towards a colored person of color. Maybe it’s decades of inferiority rooted in agony. Still, as per the reports, Black people in America are about 7½ times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white people and 80% more likely to be innocent than others convicted of the same offence.
Of 346 black people killed by police, only 2 cases have led to convictions. https://t.co/0WDlgUjXDN pic.twitter.com/eHJbQjhnox
— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) May 2, 2016
The study also showed that innocent Black defendants receive brutal sentences than innocent white defendants. People of color were overrepresented in all categories of 1,167 wrongful murder convictions in the Registry’s database.
The conclusion, well, we hate to say, but about thousands of Americans have been falsely convicted of murder over the past 40 years, and more than half of them are Black.
