Gregory Barnes Jr. was driving in Muncie last week, when a patrol car pulled up behind him and signaled him to the side of the road.
In a time of tense relations between police and citizens, especially with communities of color, it’s the opening scene to countless videos on social media.
After officer Shawn Cosgrove pulled Barnes over, he, too, took out his phone — but the selfie he later posted on Facebook Friday has gone viral for all the right reasons.
In his post, which has been shared half-a-million times, Barnes, who works as a vice president of sales at STAR financial bank, wrote:
I was pulled over today for speeding. The officer did not know me nor did I know him, but we each showed one another a mutual display of respect in our interaction. He was doing his job, and I had made a mistake in trying to hurry home to get started moving that lead to our path’s crossing. He ran my information, and in the end we talked more about how are individual days were going, and the situations and circumstances within our society that have lead to interactions such as he and I’s to play out much more negatively, some even deadly, than ours, than we talked about the situation that lead to him pulling me over. In the end we both thanked each other for our mutual displays of respect and agreed to take a “selfie” together to help tell our story.
I can’t stress enough that NO demographic and/or profession of people are all bad. Neither of us are the enemy. We can continue to fight against each other until we are literally “black and blue”, or we can show one another the respect we inherently deserve, not as “black man” and “blue police officer,” but as humans. None greater, none less…#Respect
I know for sure for sure if my granddaddy was living I know he’d be proud of me…
— Greg Barnes Jr. (@GregBarnesJr) September 22, 2015
