The incident, which fortunately turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, happened in Los Angeles following a photo shoot for U.K. mag New Music Express outside Joyrich on Melrose Avenue, according to NME.com.

Cudi and his crew, accompanied by NME writer Emily Mackay, had just gotten into a pair of SUVs and a Jeep and were traveling on Fairfax Avenue when they suddenly found two police cruisers blocking the road ahead and three more cars surrounding them.

According to Mackay, who wrote about the ordeal on her blog, everyone present was ordered out of the vehicles, forced to kneel on the ground and handcuffed by “10 or so armed officers with an alarming amount of weaponry pointed in our direction as a helicopter circles overhead.”

The police quickly determined that it wasn’t Cudi and company they were looking for – Mackay credits her “over-accommodating politeness” – and the party was released.

The officer in charge apologized and said that a nearby resident had erroneously fingered the group for a robbery in the neighborhood, offering the half-hearted explanation, “She’s white, and 50, so don’t blame me…”

Despite all the unnecessary drama, the rapper took the event in stride and even sympathized with authorities.

“Who knows, really, the story changed a bunch,” Cudi explained when questioned about what happened by NME.com. “I’m just really happy to be back. I’m a free man! For that moment I was not free. I was in handcuffs. It did not feel very comfortable.

“We’re in L.A., it’s a rowdy place in the United States, you know? And a lot of shit goes down. And these cops have to use force. So it’s, like, I understand that they were doing their job. I just wish we weren’t in that place at that time.”

Mackay, who was obviously shaken and troubled by the incident, wasn’t as kind.

“Was there a burglary nearby, and we were wrongly fingered?,” she wrote on her blog. “Did some crazy old bat make the burglary up? Did she just not like the way Cudi was chewing his meatball sub?

“Either way, it’s an object lesson in how the U.S. really is a very different, quite scary and pretty racist place. And in how agile you can be when someone’s pointing a shotgun at you…”

Read “The Day I Had A Gun Pointed At My Head By The LAPD,” Emily Mackay’s complete eyewitness account of Kid Cudi’s brush with the law here.