The first clue should have been a guy driving a McLaren into a football stadium. Then again, if cops outside of the PGA Championship can’t figure out that the guy was Scottie Scheffler, why should Miami-Dade motorcycle cops realize the driver was Tyreek Hill?
When stopped by police while allegedly speeding and not wearing a seatbelt, would the first thing out of your mouth be “don’t tap on my window,” and then repeated over and over rather than, well, “Good morning, Officer”? Would the next thing be to not lower your window when the officer directs you to keep your window down, an unremarkable request so the cop can see what the person stopped is doing behind his darkly tinted window?
In the footage, the first officer to approach the car asked Hill why he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, to which Hill replied by asking the officer not to knock on his window as he had moments before. After Hill handed over his license he rolled his window back up, which the officer appeared to take exception to. After the first officer knocked on the window again and told Hill to keep the window rolled down, a second officer came over, opened the door to Hill’s car and pulled him out by the arm. The officer grabbed Hill by back of his head, forced him to the ground and handcuffed him with the help of another officer.
But then, was this a scenario to de-escalate tension or to leap straight into ordering the driver out of the car, to physically remove him from the car and then put him on the ground and cuff him? Did he do anything to suggest he posed a threat to the officers? Granted, there was some whiff of contempt of cop by not being obsequious when commanded to act,
By the third time, less than two minutes after the interaction began and with the window nearly closed, the officer said, “Keep your window down, or I’m going to get you out of the car.”
Then, almost immediately, he said he would do just that. “As a matter of fact, get out of the car,” the officer said. “Get out of the car right now. We’re not playing this game.”
Was Hill expecting to be treated like the Dolphins star wide receiver? Was Hill uncooperative because stars don’t have to follow commands? Or was it because he was a black man driving a McLaren?
A little later, while the detaining officer was on his computer, Mr. Hill, now sitting on the curb, said, “I’m just being Black in America, bro.”
“We’re dark too, bro,” an officer replied, apparently referring to several of the officers being Hispanic. “We’re people of color.”
As the phrase “nobody is above the law” has become a ubiquitous chant these days, does that not apply to football players as well?
In an interview on CNN on Monday night, Mr. Hill said that he had done what the officers had asked of him, and that he was “shellshocked” and “embarrassed” about what had happened.
“I was following rules,” he said. “I didn’t want to create a scene at all. I just really wanted to get the ticket, and then just go on about my way.”
There is little question that Hill did not pose a threat to the police officer justifying his being taken out of his car and put on the ground to be cuffed. While he may not have been the most cooperative driver, he did nothing to justify the cops’ resort to force. But the fact that they stopped the Dolphins’ star (remember the first clue, the McLaren?) meant that the stop would be subject to intense scrutiny, parsed detail by detail, and even though Hill was eventually given two citations and released to go play football and score a touchdown, the stop provides a detailed view into the dynamic between cops and driver, and cops and football star.
Who was wrong? Was the force used necessary? Justified? Was this just another example of “driving while black” in America, or an example of wide receiver privilege by chastising a cop not to tap on your window and refusing to roll down his window, unlike any driver stopped for traffic violations who doesn’t want to push the police into taking more extreme action?
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