close
close

Bodycam footage of Tyreek Hill’s arrest shows that Miami-Dade police were wrong

Hours before the Miami Dolphins opened their season against the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday, Miami-Dade motorcycle police officers stopped Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill as he approached Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens. With Miami-Dade police releasing 105 minutes of the officers' bodycam footage, we all witnessed what happened: Police officers forgot their training, forgot the duties of their job, gave in to their macho urge for dominance, and thus caused a violent confrontation when nothing of the sort was appropriate.

It could have been a lot worse. But I say as someone who has supervised police in several cities that what happened was just stupid and bad.

Give me my ticket, brother, then I can go. I'm going to be late. Do what you have to do.

TYREEK HILL to the police officer who stopped him

In the footage, we see a black sports car speeding by and the cops are chasing it. We hear a cop telling Hill he was speeding. Hill then rolls up his window. The cop then knocks on the window and tells Hill to roll it back down. Hill complains about the knocking and the cop asks him why he isn't wearing a seatbelt. “Give me my ticket, brother, and I can go,” Hill says. “I'm late. Do what you have to do.”

This triggers another exchange over the window, followed by the officer saying, “We're not playing that game.” He then opens the car door, pulls Hill out by the back of his head, forces him face down to the ground, and handcuffs him with the help of other officers. “When we tell you to do something, you do it. Do you understand?” the officer says. “Not what you want, but what we tell you.”

The officers then take Hill to the curb and order him to sit down. When he doesn't immediately obey, the officer who pulled him from the car runs over to him and forces him to sit on the ground.

A fundamental principle of modern policing is to de-escalate confrontations. But as we saw in Miami on Sunday, too many police officers have too often done the exact opposite – and thanks to cellphone cameras and body cameras, they did so in front of an audience of millions.

Bodycam footage shows that Hill posed no threat. He gave his driver's license and vehicle registration to the officer who asked for them.

After identifying him, the police should have just given him a ticket and let him drive on. There was no reason to pull him out of the car and shove him to the ground.

In this case, the de-escalation attempt came from two of Hill's teammates: Calais Campbell and Jonnu Smith, who arrived on the scene and tried to calm the situation. After Campbell raised his hands in a gesture of frustration, an officer yelled, “You want handcuffs too?” And he was given one.

Meanwhile, we hear a police officer say to the person who initiated the traffic stop: “You know who that is, right? That's a star player for the Dolphins.”

The encounter ends abruptly as more police officers and the Dolphins' head of security arrive. Hill is cited for reckless driving and not wearing a seatbelt. Campbell is not cited. Hill made it to the game and finished with seven catches for 130 yards and a touchdown in the Dolphins' 20-17 victory.

The fact that it all ended abruptly when he was being described as the Dolphins' star lends credence to a statement Hill made in a postgame press conference on Sunday: “What if I wasn't Tyreek Hill? God knows what that guy or those guys would have done.”

In an interview with NBC News the next day, he said, “It just went from 0 to 100, man, from the moment these guys pulled up behind me and knocked on my window, it went from 0 to 100 immediately.” In a statement Monday, the police department said it had assigned Danny Torres, a 27-year veteran, to administrative duties while the department's internal affairs division investigates the case.

Tyreek Hill is violently dragged from his vehicle by a Miami-Dade Department of Transportation motorcycle police officer on Sunday.Miami Dade Police

There may be some apologists who will try to cite Hill's previous encounters with the law as an excuse for police actions Sunday. (Over a period of about 10 years, he was suspected of domestic violence and child abuse, and of punching a man in the back of the head during an argument at a Miami marina. In the first case, he pleaded guilty; in the second, he denied any involvement and was not charged; and in the third, while he was not charged, he reached a settlement with the alleged victim.) But none of that had any bearing on what happened Sunday. We saw it all on video, including being told who Hill was after the first officer roughly grabbed him. Police are required to follow their training at all times.

The lesson we can learn from the death of Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and the killing of Sonya Massey in July in Sangamon County, Illinois, is that when police fail to adequately de-escalate situations, deaths can occur.

I joined the Miami-Dade Police Department immediately after the 1980 Miami riots, which erupted after four police officers beat Arthur McDuffie to death following a traffic stop.

I joined the Miami-Dade Police Department after the 1980 riots that followed four officers beating Arthur McDuffie to death after a traffic stop. Determined that it would never happen again, the police supported a bold experiment in community policing that I was thrilled to be a part of. To me, it seemed like policing in America was turning a corner as numerous police departments began, often reluctantly, to embrace the concept of community policing and related doctrines such as the use of de-escalation tactics.

But the cases of Brown, Floyd, Massey and so many other tragedies and near-tragedies make me ask: Are we going backwards here?

“If we tell you to do something, do it. Do you understand? Not what you want, but what we tell you.” Was this moment of domination of Tyreek Hill the victory a Miami-Dade officer hoped for? Why else would he drag a man who wasn't resisting headfirst out of his car? Why would he force his body and face onto the asphalt? Why would he handcuff him when he wasn't resisting?

Will the video of the police unjustly taking down Hill be forgotten within days? Will we be told, as we have been told so many times before, that what we saw was the work of “a few black sheep”? That explanation has long since ceased to be credible.

I know that many police officers and law enforcement officers have long since moved beyond the practice of brutal, thoughtless policing. But there are still too many. Hill encountered them on Sunday. As I said, it could have been worse for Hill, but it was still bad enough.

You may also like...