The body camera footage of NFL star Tyreek Hill’s traffic stop before his team’s season opener was released on Monday. It showed a group of police officers on a power trip, exhibiting unprofessionalism and abuse of authority through their ultra-aggressive and combative behavior. From what I saw, they went out of their way to escalate the situation far beyond what was necessary.
Speaking about the incident on Sunday, the Miami Dolphins receiver posed a pertinent question: “What if I wasn’t Tyreek Hill?” His point being that if he was a Black man who wasn’t famous, would the situation have ended a lot worse? The answer is surely, yes. Nobody is saying Hill did everything correctly on Sunday – he admits on the footage that he was speeding and did not immediately comply with the officers’ instructions when stopped. But if his name was Becky or Brad rather than Tyreek and he had done the same things, would the police have dragged him out his car, handcuffed him and shoved him face down on the hot Miami asphalt?
If Becky had told the officers that she just had knee surgery (as Hill informed the police on Sunday during his detainment) would they have questioned her story and manhandled her anyway? Or made wise cracks about ear surgery and forced her to the ground again, as they did with Hill?
No matter how much “attitude” Becky gave the officers it’s highly unlikely any of the above would have occurred; and I’ve seen the contrast myself.
One of the most eye opening experiences I had when I went to college was seeing how white people talked to the police. I had never seen anything like it before. I remember my first night on campus, which was filled with parties across Syracuse University. I witnessed a white girl cuss a police officer out, calling him every name in the book. All because he told her she couldn’t park on the grass. But the officer didn’t throw her to the floor or handcuff her. He didn’t feel threatened by her words because she wasn’t “immediately cooperative with the officer on the scene pursuant to policy” (the words Miami’s police union used to justify the treatment of Hill). Instead, the officer at Syracuse maintained his composure and didn’t respond to the barrage of insults that were being hurled at him. I was shocked.
A few nights later, I saw another white girl cuss out a police officer who appeared to be writing her a ticket. Again, there was no retribution.
It wasn’t just the girls either. I saw a group of drunk, white fraternity boys, red party cups still in their hands, carrying on in the street and hollering for no reason (something, I was to learn, white fraternity guys love do). The police politely told them to go home. Their response: “No we don’t want to. It’s a free country”. Were they shoved to the ground or given a lick with a baton before spending a night in the cells? Of course not.
I told my mother about it when I called home. “Mom, you won’t believe how these white people talk to the police up here and nothing happens to them”. She listened and replied: “As long as you know the rules are different for you. You better not even think about doing anything anywhere close to what you see them doing because the response will be very different from the police”.
That is a lesson that Hill learned this past Sunday. He can’t do what white people do.
The examples are almost countless. If Colt Gray, the white teenager who killed four people in a school shooting this month, had been Black, do you think the police would have taken him alive? After all, the police killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice and all he had was a toy gun. Another white teenager, Dylann Roof, murdered nine Black people and was taken alive while Sonya Massey, a Black mother, was shot in the head by a police officer this year after she moved towards a pot of hot water. Another white teenager, Payton Gendron, murdered 10 Black people in a racist mass shooting and was taken alive, while Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old Black man, was killed in the backyard of his grandmother’s house because the police mistook his cell phone for a gun. The officers fired 20 rounds at him. Travis Reinking, a white man in his 20s, murdered four people and was taken alive while Willie McCoy, also in his 20s but Black, was sleeping in his car at a Taco Bell when police approached him and shot him 55 times. Let’s not pretend that if the races were switched in any of these situations, the outcome would have been the same.
It’s unfortunate but what Hill, and every Black person in America, has to do instead when pulled over by the police is as follows:
1) Turn your music down
2) Roll down your window
3) Take your license out and place it on the dashboard
4) If it’s night-time, turn on the interior light
5) Put your hands on the steering wheel, at 10 and 2, when the cops approach
6) If your registration is in the glove compartment, tell the officers you are reaching for it before taking your hands off the steering wheel. Slowly retrieve it as any sudden moves will make the police jumpy and more likely to unholster their weapon.
If you’re white and reading this you may not be familiar with this list – because you typically don’t need to worry about the consequences. But when Black people are stopped by the police, we are tasked with deescalating a situation that is only escalated in the first place because of the color of our skin. So we have to appear completely non-threatening, even if we are confronted with an overzealous cop who is itching to exert their power and dominance – as these cops clearly were with Hill and his teammates. We live in a society where cops have the freedom and protection to act on impulse. Unfortunately, trying to deescalate the situation often isn’t enough to keep a Black person from the wrath of an overzealous cop.
We can see that in the video from Hill’s detainment. His teammate, Jonnu Smith, was on the phone telling someone about the incident, doing nothing to antagonize the situation. Yet an officer confronted him with unnecessary aggression. Another Dolphins player, defensive tackle Calais Campbell, was also looking to check on his teammate. Like Smith, he was non-threatening but he was met with aggression and briefly placed in handcuffs too.
Police officers themselves know this is a problem. In my book Police Brutality And White Supremacy: The Fight Against American Traditions, I interviewed Joe Ested, a former vice-president of New York’s police union. He told me that “there are a lot more good cops then there are bad, but there are in fact systemic problems that have existed in law enforcement for many years. And these problems will always exist until law enforcement acknowledges that there is in fact a problem.”
The police officers who encountered Hill, Smith and Campbell, who are all Black, on Sunday appeared intent on escalating a situation rather than protecting members of the public. But when people are given free rein to behave however they want in positions of power, situations like Sunday are inevitable. Add in the fraught racial politics of America and things can get much, much worse.
One of the officers involved in Sunday’s incident has been placed on administrative duties. But would that have happened if the Black man they detained wasn’t one of the best players in the NFL? Or would they have immunity from prosecution, something Donald Trump has vowed to grant police officers if he wins this year’s presidential election?
Sunday’s incident shows there should be no position in the United States that has zero accountability. And, yes, that includes the police.
Etan Thomas played in the NBA from 2000 through 2011. He is a published poet, activist and motivational speaker
