The actor Danièle Watts and her boyfriend Brian James Lucas have been charged with lewd conduct, after a highly publicised incident in which they accused an LAPD officer of racial bias.
The pair were detained, though not arrested, by police on 11 September after a complaint that they were having sex in their car, which was parked outside CBS studios in the Studio City area of Los Angeles.
After the incident Watts, who played the slave Coco in Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained, and Lucas, a celebrity chef, complained on social media that the police had mistaken them for a sex worker and client.
In a police recording of the incident leaked to TMZ, LAPD sergeant Jim Parker can be heard telling Watts: “Somebody’s made a call, which means it gives me the right to be here. It gives me the right to identify you. By law.”
The actor replies: “Do you know how many times the cops have been called just because we’re black? Just because we’re black and he’s white?”
Watts said that she and Lucas had merely been kissing. The actor was handcuffed, put in the back of a police car and questioned by the officers after refusing to confirm her identity and walking away from the police.
Watts posted pictures on her Facebook page of an injury to her wrist, which she said had been sustained when she was handcuffed, as well as a picture of her in tears with her hands restrained behind her back and an officer questioning her.
Parker strongly disputed the allegation of racial bias, insisting that he was right to investigate after a member of the public supplied a description of the make and licence plate of the car and a description of Watts and Lucas.
TMZ reports that after listening to the recording of the incident, speaking to witnesses and seeing photographs of Lucas and Watts in the car, state prosecutors decided to prosecute the pair for lewd conduct.
The crime is punishable by up to six months in jail.
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