Cote: Dolphins’ Tyreek Hill was victim of police abuse of power, MDPD needs to apologize | Opinion
Police officers wear body cameras for many reasons. One of them is to perhaps record incriminating evidence against the bad guys. But sometimes the police turn out to be the bad guys, and the incriminating evidence is on them.
“What if I wasn’t Tyreek Hill?” will stand as one of the most important quotes from this NFL season newly underway — words important beyond football.
The body cam footage from the Miami-Dade Police Department itself, augmented by phone camera videos shot by early arriving Miami Dolphins fans who saw it happen outside Hard Rock Stadium on Sunday, includes one especially telling snippet.
This was after the police had stopped Hill for speeding, pulled him forcibly from his car and soon had him face down on the pavement, handcuffed behind his back. They had just run the license plate on Hill’s black sports car.
You hear one cop say, “He’s one of the Dolphins’ star players.”
You hear another say, “F---.”
The Dade cops knew at that moment they had been caught.
They knew at that moment this was not a routine traffic stop, not the kind of excessive force and abuse of power that might go unnoticed if the “perpetrator” was some Joe Nobody as opposed to an athlete recently voted the best player in the entire NFL. Somebody famous. A “detainment” that would make national news and is still making it even as the Dolphins prepare to host the rival Buffalo Bills this Thursday night.
Tyreek Hill didn’t deserve special treatment or a celebrity favor Sunday.
What he also didn’t deserve was to be treated like a criminal when, at worst, he had done something they give you traffic tickets for.
Hill pinned prone to the pavement and cuffed was shocking to see. He was not carrying a weapon. He did not physically challenge any officer. It was the police who were the aggressors for no good reason, drastically and needlessly escalating what could have been a routine traffic stop. The cameras saw it all.
Was Hill’s deportment absolutely perfect? No. At one point he rolled up his darkly tinted driver’s side window as an officer stood addressing him. He was phoning the Dolphins’ director of security who is involved in such matters. Without waiting the cops lifted the bat-wing door of the car and violently yanked Hill out.
Seeing Hill face down on the ground surrounded by officers who were not Black like him, my mind raced to George Floyd. Was this how it started for him, too?
The Miami-Dade Police Department quickly reassigned one of the involved officers to administrative duty. Its Internal Affairs department is investigating further.
The investigation should lead to a public apology from the MDPD. It should lead to discipline if not dismissal for officers directly involved in the abuse of force.
“Serve and protect,” right?
Usually it’s the police protecting us from the bad guys.
Sometimes it’s the police we need protecting from.
I am not anti-police. We need police, and I have little doubt the vast majority are good people. But the ones in the videos slamming Hill down and cuffing him for no apparent reason give police a bad name — and disproportionately so.
Maybe Hill was speeding. But his real crime was DWB (Driving While Black). A young Black man in an expensive sports car can be triggering to cops with a prejudice problem. A young Black man, with or without the fancy wheels, can be enough.
For anyone too busy to follow current events, incidents like the one that involved Hill are much too common nationwide, and here.
The Miami-Dade Police Department is a major institution embedded in the community.
Guess what? So are the Miami Dolphins.
And the Dolphins, Monday night, issued an official club statement in support of Hill that pulled no punches.
The Dolphins’ description and accusation of police actions included the following words: “Overly aggressive,” “violent,” “maddening and heartbreaking,” “unnecessary force,” “hostility,” “misguided power,” and “despicable behavior.”
The club also was careful to note in its statement, “We are proud to have a strong and positive relationship with the Miami-Dade Police Department and other law enforcement agencies and recognize that the vast majority of officers do serve the community with the utmost character and desire to protect all citizens.”
Likewise Hill’s agent, Drew Rosenhaus, said Tuesday his client wants to stage a community forum including the police department to “take this negative and turn it into a positive.” Rosenhaus said Hill “went out of his way” to shake hands with the officers who had detained him before heading into the stadium for Sunday’s game.
Rosenhaus said Hill, in fact, might want to be a police officer after his playing career ends. But the agent also mentioned Hill’s lawyers are weighing legal action against the police department.
“He feared for his life,” Rosenhaus said of Hill. “It was absolutely sickening.”
On the Dan Le Batard Show With Stugotz on Tuesday, I mentioned to Rosenhaus things could have turned out much worse on Sunday. His response:
“I just hung up the phone with Tyreek and he made the point you did. It could have been so much worse. He said he could have been shot, could have been killed. Thank God he didn’t resist. Thank God he didn’t fight back. That could have been absolutely disasterous the way the officers were treating him.”
It has been an ugly chapter in Dolphins history as a new season of great promise unfurls.
If nothing else comes of it, the Miami-Dade Police Department needs a recommitment to making sure its own officers aren’t playing the bad guys in those body cam videos.
And at the very least the Miami-Dade Police Department owes Tyreek Hill a public apology.
This story was originally published September 10, 2024 at 3:38 PM.
