Judah Adunbi has spent the greater part of a decade trying to improve relations between police in southwestern England and the members of his Afro-Caribbean community.

Still, all the advocacy and the meetings with police were ineffective in getting the 63-year-old dreadlocked man out of the predicament he was in earlier this month - staring at the business end of a police officer's Taser.

Adunbi had been out walking his dog in Bristol, about 120 miles west of London, when officers mistook him for a robbery suspect, according to the Guardian. They didn't know him - or that he was a founding member of the police department's Independent Advisory Group, an organisation formed to improve police-community relations.

The officers asked his name but, agitated, Adunbi refused to tell them.