There is nothing in the law of the land that says a citizen must become a cringing knee servant to a duded-up traffic cop’s desire to stretch the handcuffs on his gun belt. Nothing says Tyreek Hill should have to touch his cheek to dirty pavement in obeisance to a police officer, whose normal duty is lane changes and parades but who can flex at any time into a cuff-brandishing brute just because he doesn’t like your tone. What’s happening in that body-cam video, what sickens, is situational thrall.
Column by Sally Jenkins
Hill appeared to cooperate, if grudgingly. He just didn’t grovel. That was his only offense. He didn’t address the cop as “Officer” and lower his eyes at the brilliant shine of authority. His license was in his hand as soon as the boots were standing at his car door and that gloved-to-the-knuckles hand rapped on the window. But when he scrolled down the tinted glass on his McLaren sports car and offered the license, he said curtly, “Don’t knock on my window like that.” And he added: “Give me my ticket bro, so I can go. I’m going to be late. Do what you’ve got to do.”
With that, there were suddenly tripwires all over the situation. You could just feel those burly cops stiffen and get metallic with authority, puffing under their cross belts, all heavy with their badges and latent gear, because they didn’t like Hill’s expression. It took just 15 seconds for it to turn hideous from there. Because — why? Because when he is ordered to roll his window back down, Hill doesn’t roll it all the way down. That’s it.
There is no law that says a window must be all the way down in a traffic stop. Nevertheless, instantly, three cops are on him. The first yells: “Get out of the car right now. We’re not playing this game.” Hill begins to open the car door and another cop lunges at him, grabs him by the neck, yanks him from his seat and hurls him face down to the pavement. Hill tries to tell them he was already “getting out.” But one yells, “Too late!” and another cusses him. “When we tell you to do something, you do it, understand? Not when you want but when we tell you. You’re a little f---ing confused.”
Now there are knees in his back, and his elbows are being wrenched behind him and his wrists cuffed. In another segment a minute later, Hill has been moved to a curb where he is held by a cop, who starts to force him down to his knees. “I just had surgery on my knee!” Hill says, alarmed. At that, another cop lunges at him from behind, grabs him with a forearm around the neck and forcibly crumples him. You can hear someone snarling at him:
“Really, what a coincidence! Did you have surgery on your ears when we told you to put the window down?”
Hill had cooperated with every order. He did so at times irritatedly, dismissively or halfheartedly, and with a sure sense that he had somewhere more important to be than fooling with a couple of Dudley Do-Rights on souped-up scooters. His only crime?
His attitude. His insouciant, “a traffic ticket wouldn’t pay for a taillight on my fine car” demeanor.
It was fitting — and in line with the rest of the gross police misconduct Sunday — that the union representing the cops issued a statement that insulted public intelligence. Frankly, it should worry everyone with car keys. “First, to be clear, at no time was he ever under arrest,” the union said. Ahhhhhh, so a Miami-Dade traffic cop has the right to cuff and manhandle citizens even if they are not actually in custody. The statement continued, “Mr. Hill was not immediately cooperative with the officers on the scene, who, pursuant to policy and for their immediate safety, placed Mr. Hill in handcuffs.”
Now, here is a menacingly vague piece of verbiage. “Immediately cooperative.” The only threat to safety in the Hill traffic stop was the safety of these cops’ eggshell egos. You folks out there better hop to it. Fail to show enough immediacy to a cop, and you might offend his vanity and get an armbar around the neck.
That portion of the statement concludes, “Mr. Hill, still, uncooperative, refused to sit on the ground and was therefore redirected to the ground.” Redirected. Here again, it’s an interestingly vague word that the police union uses to insidiously assert a right of force.
What disturbs so much about the video is that it’s ultimately about obedience. A culture of pure obedience is not a healthy one — it’s a cult or something worse. In cultures of obedience, escalations from the harmless to the harmful happen quickly.
The obvious must be stated: If you cannot uphold authority with a defense clearer than an obfuscating word like “redirected,” then that authority has been abused. The police union’s language is a danger to the public in and of itself. Suggestions for police reform never seem to get at the cultural problem, the mentality of instant obedience. What’s truly needed, and which unions should help with, is some self-policing.
In 2020, the Yale Law Journal published an interesting essay by alum-attorney James Mooney titled “The Power of Police Officers to Give ‘Lawful Orders.’” In it, Mooney observes that an insistence on overbroad discretion “allows police to needlessly escalate confrontations due to civilian confusion or minor noncompliance.”
That’s a pretty good description of what the body-cam footage shows. A minor compliance issue became a needless escalation — not because of Hill’s conduct but that of those chesty cops, their belts jingling with tools of submission and voices that demanded bootlicks. White, Black, Latino, male, female, regardless, a lot of us have been there with Hill by the side of the road. You’ve been pulled over, in a hurry, unclear on what you did wrong, and given a cop an exasperated eye roll or taken a tone — and felt that instant, dangerous hardening of authority. It’s then you realize how at the mercy of it you are and how fragile a citizen’s rights in a republic really are. They can disappear instantly through a too-narrow crack in a window.
