Simone nodded slowly. "I can," she said. "I also want to point out that you have not asked the two men currently carrying my furniture through my front door for the same proof. I'd like that acknowledged on camera."
She was right. Lawson had not said a single word to the movers, both of whom were white. He had walked straight past them without a glance and gone directly to Simone. The body camera catches Lawson looking back at the moving truck, looking at the movers, looking back at Simone. You can watch the awareness cross his face, slow and uncomfortable: the recognition that he had made a choice when he walked up that driveway, and that choice was now documented on four recording devices and being acknowledged out loud by the woman he had made it about.
"I treat everybody the same," he said.
Simone said, "Your body camera footage will settle that question. Shall we continue?"
At this point in the encounter, Lawson told Simone he was going to need to run her name before he could clear the scene.
Simone said, "That's fine. My name is Simone Adrienne Carter, C-A-R-T-E-R." She paused. Then she said, "While you do that, I want to make sure I'm understanding the full situation correctly. Is it your position, Officer Lawson, that a Black woman standing on her own front porch in a residential neighborhood in the middle of a Saturday afternoon overseeing a licensed professional moving company constitutes suspicious behavior sufficient to warrant police dispatch and a property ownership investigation?"
Lawson said a call was made and they had to respond to calls.
Simone said, "I understand you respond to calls. What I'm asking is whether you, personally, observing this scene as you arrived, saw anything that you would characterize as suspicious, setting aside the call entirely?"
Four seconds of silence. You can count them on the footage: one, two, three, four.
Lawson said he was going to run her name, and he walked back to the patrol car.
This is the moment everything changed. Durbin, still standing near the porch, had pulled out his phone. He was doing what any young officer standing in an uncomfortable situation does when he has 30 seconds and a data signal: he was Googling Simone Adrienne Carter, Federal Judge, Southern District of Georgia.