Seattle Seahawks star Michael Bennett gave his first public interview about his incident with police in Las Vegas on Wednesday morning, speaking with Good Morning America in a 3-minute segment that discussed the defensive end’s detainment by Las Vegas police on the night of the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight.
Bennett said police in Last Vegas threatened to “blow my f*cking head off” in a chaotic scene where people thought they heard gunshots and were running away from a casino. Bennett was ordered to the ground by police and put in handcuffs, a scene that Bennett believes was racially motivated.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell issued a statement of support for Bennett in the wake of the incident, but the Last Vegas police called for the NFL to investigate Bennett in an unwieldy statement issued last week. That set the scene for Bennett to speak publicly about the incident on national television.
EXCLUSIVE: @Seahawks' Michael Bennett (@mosesbread72) speaks out about what happened in Las Vegas for first time: https://t.co/2K4Rxv6Adu pic.twitter.com/ev1MOtdG9G
— Good Morning America (@GMA) September 13, 2017
“When they see you as a suspect and their guns are drawn, you don’t know what to do,” Bennett said.
The interviewer suggested that Bennett say he’s an NFL player, but Bennett said that was not important in the moment.
“I said that, he told me to shut the f*ck up.”
In the interview, Bennett stressed that race placed a major factor in the incident, saying it was the only thing officers saw in him and the reason they considered him a suspect.
“You think because you win a Super Bowl, you think that because you do all this stuff in the community that you’d be treated as a human being, Bennett said. “But at that point I wasn’t seen as nothing. I was just seen as a suspect.”
Bennett said the police officers actually searched for Bennett on Google to confirm his identity.
“I went from being just a black man to being a football player,” he said.
