“Every time I finish work, I’m hiding in my house … because I don’t want to face another police (encounter),” he said outside the Tokyo District Court.
The third plaintiff, a man born in Pakistan who has been a Japanese citizen since the age of 13, said he has been questioned more than a dozen times, including once in front of his house.
Although lawsuits have been filed in the past about excessive questioning by police, this is the first one regarding racial profiling during questioning, lawyers for the three men said.
In 2021, the NPA spotted “six inappropriate cases of police questioning even though officers had no intention of discrimination based on race or nationality”, a senior agency official told parliament in 2022.
The NPA continues to educate officers to respect human rights, the official said at the time.