A 17-year-old in Southgate, Michigan is facing charges of filing a false police report after she apparently lied about being pulled over by a fake police officer, who she coincidentally described as a tall, Black man.
According to the News-Herald, 17-year-old Faith Gentry stood silent during an arraignment, refusing to plead either guilty or not guilty. As a matter of routine, the judge usually takes this sort of silence as a not guilty plea. Her bond was set at $25,000 and she’s scheduled for a pretrial hearing for March 8.
Last week, Gentry appeared on Fox2Detroit to tell her story after she says she was pulled over.
“I was coming down southbound down Fort and this ‘cop’ put his lights on and I pulled over,” she claimed.
Gentry claimed that the man looked legit to her, as a new driver, dressed with a badge on his shoulder and a button-up shirt, with a gun on his belt.
The fake cop, she alleged, told her that her blinker was out and that he couldn’t see her license plate, things that made no sense to her as her car had been recently serviced. He then told her that she would get a ticket that would be sent in the mail.
“I was kind of in shock I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
She described the cop as a tall Black man, which concerned Wyandotte police as they said that there were no Black officers on the force (that’s a separate issue for another story).
Her description led police to be on the lookout for a 6-foot tall Black man, with a thin build and scruffy facial hair, who drives a black Ford Fusion with police on the side in gray letters.
“I’m scared for her to be out there,” Dawn Gentry, Faith’s mother, told the news station at the time.
But as we now know, this was all a lie and thankfully, no innocent Black men were harmed or detained in the incident, because this could have ended very differently.
Over the weekend, Gentry apparently confessed to Southgate police investigators that she had made the whole story up. The confession was probably moot though, as the Southgate police noticed early in their investigation that “the story was not matching up with the facts.”
“Public safety is our main concern and we cannot have or tolerate [hoaxes] and fear being put into our residents’ minds,” Southgate police noted in a statement, according to the News-Herald. “The police officers out working the streets of Downriver cannot do their jobs [efficiently and effectively] with this type of behavior.”