The actor said he was held at gunpoint inside his own home.
Actor Ving Rhames says cops held him at gunpoint while he was relaxing inside his own home in July 2016.
"I get up, I open the door, there's a red dot pointed at my face from a 9 millimeter," Rhames said on Sirius XM's "The Clay Cane Show" Friday. "And they say, 'Put up your hands.'"
Rhames says he was the one police were after when a female neighbor called the cops on him because she thought he was breaking into his Santa Monica home.
The "Pulp Fiction" star says he was watching TV when a neighbor called 911 to report "a large black man" breaking into the house. He says police responded with guns drawn.
Santa Monica police said that after arriving at his home, one of the officers recognized the "Mission: Impossible" star, not because he's an actor, but because their kids play basketball together. At that moment, police said the situation de-escalated quickly.
The actor worries what could have happened.
"My problem is, as I said to them, what if it was my son, and he had a video game remote or something? And you thought it was a gun, just like you know, I don't know, Trayvon [Martin] had a bag of Skittles," he said.
After the story came out, Santa Monica police said over the weekend that the incident occurred on July 26, 2016.
"In our actions responding to what would be a residential burglary, holding a potential suspect at gunpoint would not be out of the normal," Lt. Saul Rodriguez, the executive officer for Santa Monica police's media relations unit, told NBC News. “We responded to a call for service. The community expects and deserves that."
After the incident, police implemented a program encouraging residents to get to know their neighbors.
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