Award-Winning Screenwriter Alex O'Keefe Arrested on Train After 'Karen' Calls Police

Alex O’Keefe, an award-winning screenwriter known for his work on FX’s “The Bear” and as a speechwriter for Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), was recently removed from an MTA train headed to Connecticut by the police. The removal occurred after a white woman on the train complained about his posture.

In a video posted to his official Instagram account on Sept. 18, O’Keefe shared, “I was arrested on the MTA train to Connecticut today, pulled off, handcuffed, and detained.” An old white woman got on the train and immediately pointed at me and told me to correct how I was sitting. I refused, so she went to the conductor and complained. The conductor called the police and stopped the train. While waiting for the police to arrive, the old Karen’s friend said, “You’re not the minority anymore.” O’Keefe does not indicate where he was traveling from to get to Connecticut.

O’Keefe continued, “The police told me to leave the train. I refused and asked what I was doing illegally. They claimed that my refusal to leave the train was disrupting the peace. They pulled me off the train and arrested me without even talking to the Karen who reported the one Black person on the train. On the platform, the police detained me and interrogated me. Only Black folks stayed nearby and recorded the arrest. When I demanded a lawyer and reminded them they didn’t even take a statement from the woman who complained, they eventually released me. This country is growing more psycho by the day. What will you do about it?”

O’Keefe’s experience illustrates a troubling pattern in which white individuals misuse the police, motivated by racial bias and the belief that Black people are inherently criminal, even when those being targeted are law-abiding citizens.

Another passenger captured the incident on video, which has since gone viral on TikTok.

In 2018, Khalil Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard University, discussed the increasing number of recorded incidents in which white citizens call the police on Black individuals. He spoke about this trend in the context of the first Trump administration during an interview with NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

According to Muhammad, “Our current president ran as a ‘law-and-order’ candidate in a country with a long history where the notion of using the police as the foot soldiers of controlling African-Americans, limiting their freedom, deciding that they are indeed second-class citizens, and enforcing those laws when they were legal in this country is a really big part of the problem. And to evoke that mantra, to run on that mantra, to elicit the support of the entire community of professional police agencies means that we’ve now got citizens who are playing out this policy choice—this set of politics.”

Muhammad’s analysis continues to be pertinent. During Trump’s second campaign, he made fewer overt references to being a “law-and-order” candidate; however, some observers argue that this theme had already been firmly established by that point.

“On the other side of the ledger, people who were fighting against this kind of ethos in our country—this very punitive, racialized ethos—want to resist this now, so they’re much more likely to pull out their cellphones … And because of cellphone video and its ubiquitous role in this conversation, all of us are bearing witness to the problem,” Muhammad noted.

Vesla Mae Weaver, a Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of several books on race and democracy, observed in a 2018 Vox op-ed that white individuals frequently utilize the police as a personal security force because this approach proves effective. This pattern is evident in O’Keefe’s experience.

“The breezy deployment of police by whites at Yale, at Starbucks, at Walmart, and in other social spaces vividly reveals how white people use law enforcement to exert control over their fellow Black Americans… The Yale student (a white student who called the police on a napping Black student at the university in 2018) was not, as far as we know, attempting to thwart police from discovering her wrongdoing,” Weaver wrote. “But her enlistment of police was racially strategic, meant to marshal existing stereotypes of Blacks to reconfigure her space and dispense with a Black person. It fits a societal algorithm that Blackness itself is suspect.”

Although some states have enacted laws that make it illegal to make police calls that "unlawfully discriminate" or target "protected classes," Brian Levin, a criminologist and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino, stated in a 2020 interview with The Washington Post that a more effective solution lies in addressing the underlying racism present in American society.