Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle stood in front of a dozen news cameras this afternoon at police headquarters to apologize for the behavior of an officer who stopped a family outside a hospital emergency room.Moats was speeding because his mother-in-law was upstairs dying. He recieved a call that he and his wife should get to the hospital if they wanted to see the woman before she passed. Moats explained this several times, the cop did not care."His behavior in my opinion, did not exhibit the common sense, discretion, the compassion that we expect our officers to exhibit," the chief told a packed audience of media outlets that included Inside Edition.
During the traffic stop, caught on the officer's in-car camera, Powell berated the driver, 26-year-old NFL running back Ryan Moats, and threatened him with arrest for running a traffic light.
"I can screw you over," said Powell, 25. "I'd rather not do that.
The chief also praised Moats and his family for how they handled the officer's behavior.
Read the whole story. It's pretty shocking, in all kinds of ways. The officer did this despite the fact that his camera was recording the stop. You really have to wonder what would happen if this dude had not have been a ball-player. Also, check out Moats response to the cop. I think a lot of black men will relate. It reminded me so much of how my mother taught me to deal with the police."They exercised extraordinary patience, restraint, dealing with the behavior of our officer," Kunkle said. "At no time did Mr. Moats identify himself as an NFL football player or expect any kind of special consideration. He handled himself very, very well."
Moats rolled through a red light as he and his wife were en route to Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano. A Dallas police squad car pulled their SUV over near the hospital's emergency entrance.
Moats and his wife implored the officer to let them hurry on to the bedside of her ill mother.
Powell then spent long minutes writing Moats a ticket and threatening him with arrest...
"You really want to go through this right now?" Moats pleaded. "My mother-in-law is dying. Right now!"
His wife, Tamishia Moats, said Powell "was pointing a gun at me as soon as I got out of the car. It was the weirdest feeling because I've never had a gun pointed at me before under those circumstances."
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Douchat to TNC (paraphrased): It's a question of resources. We can lock up more of you negroes, or shoot more of you negroes in cold blood.
BTW: When my wife was in labor with our second child, we nearly had an in the car situation. With a couple miles to go I started running lights and figured I'd explain it at the ER entrance if need be. I guess being able to think that way is white privilege.
Wow, that's so messed up, but surely happens all the time. Maybe more than that. The only reason we know about this story is because dude is a ball player.
Props to the Chief for being a stand up guy and doing the right thing, even if it was too late. But the question is, did the cop get disciplined? Probably a wrist slap.
Anyway, I can't even imagine this ever happening to a white person. Instead, the cop would throw on his lights and lead the caravan to the hospital.
yeah I don't even really know what to say to that...the kid handled himself far, far better than I would have.
I was going to send this to you. Word out of Dallas is that this officer has probably worked his last day as a cop. I've heard the chief interviwed on The Ticket of all places before, and he seems like a pretty stand-up guy. He was chosen to straighten out the dept. This has rightfully gotten alot of attention and I can't see how this guy can continue to be an officer.
How Ryan Moats was able to maintain is beyond me...
"probably worked his last day as a cop."
Really?
This person should not be allowed anywhere near a firearm, nor a police badge.
Coates
I know you couldn't block quote the whole thing but you might want to point out that Ryan Moat's mother in law in fact died while he was waiting for the officer to write the ticket. He never got to see her or tell her good by. I am so pissed about the story I don't know what to do and I can definitely relate.
What we have here is a young cop without common sense or empathy.
Perhaps in time he might develop one or both.
I kinda doubt it though.
There is a percentage of people who become cops, I place it at around 20 percent, who are authoritarian personalities and have neither the sense or personality to be effective officers.
When the nurse came out to say the mother in law was dying this cop should have had the sense to let it all go.
Deleted. Come on man. You got your one shot in.
This is not at all comforting, except as some perspective: in my personal experience, there are a substantial number of police who act like this to everyone. I as a white person have been present several times, not at something quite as extreme, but at average joes being abused and threatened with jail by cops at traffic stops for minor violations.
Excuses used in the cases I witnesses included the driver looking like a hippie, or being from another state, or in the case of a car full of women, just looking visibly easy to scare. In each case, the drivers and passengers were law-abiding, no criminal record citizens who'd made minor infractions like U turns (and were not drunk, swearing or doing anything threatening except trying to speak like adults).
It doesn't seem unlikely that there's still a severe racial hierarchy: whites get abuse, non-whites have it worse, and blacks get x times more, including the drawn gun outside the emergency room.
I'm not sure if there was ever a better day in the past, but high levels of violence in society and the drug wars definitely have bred a widespread culture of police hostility to civilians.
Only a few months ago, a Boston cop stopped a couple using the breakdown lane to try to get a mother in labor to the hospital, made her pull up her shirt to show she was really pregnant and STILL ticketed her. http://jonathanturley.org/2008/12/06/boston-police-officer-tickets-woman-in-labor-trying-to-get-to-hospital/
The idea that police will put on a siren and escort a citizen in trouble to the hospital, whatever your color, seems to be a myth.
Chris Rock said it best - How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8
Hopefully this will be a case where Texans love of football will help clean up the police force.
As a white woman who used to work with a lot of black guys it was always funny to see their reactions when I told the story of getting pulled over by a cop for no reason, they thought that didn't happen to white people. My story happened when I was in East Texas and a cop started tailgating me. I sped up a little to try to create some space and he pulled me over for speeding - no ticket, he just wanted to look in the car.
The funny thing is even before I got pulled over I would always describe East Texas as a place where even the white people were scared of the cops.
The video is worse than the story. It was a pretty long arrest.
Pretty much what I was going to say. The printed story tells a lot, but the video really shows just how belligerent that cop was being, and how well Moats maintained his composure in a very tense situation.
I agree. His voice had me in tears, especially knowing that he didn't make it in time. I have nothing but respect for him for being able to keep so calm; I don't think that I could have done it, regardless of how many times my mother's told me to act around cops.
Good grief. See, if "attitude is everything" then I guess "the law" of "the totality of the circumstances" could never be given more weight than the all-important question: how deferential was this dude?
Attitude is everything if you don't want to give LEOs the appearance of legitimacy or authority.
I live in Dallas and this has been the talk all day here. There is so much outrage over a black NFL player being stopped from getting to his dying MIL's bedside and yet had the cop shot and killed a regular black man DPD would probably be making excuses for the the cop and blaming the victim for being uncooperative. This happens to people everyday. Being a prominant black citizen doesn't stop you from being a black citizen. Even Prez Obama couldn't catch a cab not too long ago.
Very true, but that's why incidents like these are very important. It's not noticed until someone prominent suffers. Hopefully the police watchdogs will be a little more viligent towards correcting such behavior. A little doubtful..but hope springs eternally.
The only accurate adjective for this officer is "douchebag". What a fucking tool.
This is why most Black folks have a hard time with Law Enforcement. Even those of us who the wrongest things we have done in our lives is parking tickets.
The cop flips on the siren/lights and chases Moats for over a minute before Moats comes to a stop. How was the cop supposed to know his particular circumstance? All he knew was that the car ran a red and raced away from the siren.
After he had been stopped, if Moats had quickly cooperated instead of yelling at the police officer that he "didn't have insurance; you go get the insurance," etc., the ticketing process would have not taken 13 minutes. As much as I sympathize with the distress that Moats went through, I think the heightened anxiety that the policeman had to navigate in an uncertain situation with someone that was yelling at a cop is also worth considering.
I feel for Moats. He was great in Philly a few years back. Explosive player.
"The majority of the comments reflect my position," said Kunkle, "that at the point the officer was told that they were responding to a dying family member, that should have been his concern: to allow those people to get access to that family member."
"I don't know how you train for these circumstances, other than to hire people with common sense and good people skills," he said.
These comments are from the Chief of Police. Moats didn't just start being a smart-ass, the "you go get the insurance" comment came after they informed the officer of what was going on. The point here, is that you would expect an officer to use common sense. Criminals fleeing from the police usually don't drive up to the emergency room of a hospital. It is clear from the video, and from everyone(mostly everyone) who saw it that after the officer became aware of the situation he continued to, for lack of a better term, be an asshole. As a result, Mr. Moats missed the passing of his mother-in-law.
You said the heightened anxiety that the policeman had to navigate in an uncertain situation with someone yelling at a cop is worth considering. I would agree, except what you describe is not what happened here. There is a difference between screaming obscenities at an officer, and screaming "my mother-in-law is dying". Mr Moats didn't even curse, and even after the situation turned from uncertain to certain, the officer still felt the need to exsert some irrational power trip that is clear evidence that he doesn't have the necessary faculties to be an officer.
I can only guess you didn't actually go and see the whole video. You can excuse the cop for the initial reaction. What you can't excuse the cop for is even after hospital officials came out and told him what was going on and that Moats' MIL was LITERALLY seconds from dying he still took his sweet ass time in writing up the ticket AND decided to try to give him a lecture before he let him go. The shit took 13 minutes man at least 5 of those minutes after there was no question what the situation was after Moats had calmed down. Because that officer decided to be a dick Moats' didn't get the chance to say goodbye and you know what, if you actually went and read the article this douchebag doesn't think he did a damn thing wrong. It kills me when I see this kind of cop apologist shit going on. Any decent human being would have let the guy go see his MIL. Hell Moats told him to just write him a ticket so he could leave. But no this muthafucka had to try to assert dominance. Its bullshit man and no amount of rationalizing changes that.
I agree with Lizkdc, I dont think the issue is 100 percent black-white. I've had a number of incidents with cops that had that obnoxious, lecturing tone that the guy who pulled Moates over had. I had my car illegally searched for a couple of hours one night on the side of a highway in Mississippi after being pulled over merely for "driving erratically", which meant I was doing nothing wrong. They were pulling the plastic paneling off of my rental car doors looking for stuff. After they found nothing, the cop lectured me about how hard his job was and how important it was not to act nervous the next time I was pulled over. Obviously, lots of police departments have horrid histories of abusing the black citizens they are supposed to be protecting, and minorities have gotten the worst of it from abusive cops, but I think part of it is just that too many cops have a paternal, I-can-do-no-wrong attitude toward everyone they encounter.
From the audio it sounds like the cop was on a power trip. I understand the uncertainty that cops must face and the danger in pulling anyone over, but the location and explanation should have changed his attitude and did not. I'm not sure whether it would have been completely different had Moats been white. It took the nurse coming out and verifying the situation to even start to make a difference to this guy, but it seems he moved then from super slow to just slow in resolving the situation. He's on "administrative leave" at this point. Hopefully if he gets to keep his job he'll be given a nice desk somewhere and taken off of the streets. He certainly does not have the people skills necessary to do the job he was doing.
This story bring a few things to mind for me:
--the poor training of police officers and the low quality of applicants hired to be police officers. (Please know that I am not disaparing the work of good, properly trained police officers; I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for them. They put their lives on the line every day for us -- usually with very low pay. However, there is a small element on the police force of officers who are arrogant, improperly trained, racist, and power hunger. In my opinion, especially in NYC, the low starting salary for police officers is not an incentive to attract "the best and brightest" to pursure a career in law enforcement.)
--the DWB (Driving While Black) or racial profiling issue. How many black people (men especially) have been stopped just for being black, thereby in the eyes of the police making them suspect?
--The need to teach young black men how to behave when stopped by police. Moats did an excellent job of maintaining his cool and remaining respectful. Unfortunately, how to interact with the police to avoid arrest -- or even worse a violent incident -- is one of the many life skills that we must teach our young black men. Correct that thought: this is a life skill that we all need.
Imagine times before videocameras-- who would have believed Moats? There would have been reports from the cop of being verbally berated, threatened with papers shoved in his face, etc. As awful as it is to say, I actually kept expecting the cop to get downright violent. "Shut your mouth"-- that's something you say to a four-year-old, not someone you think has any power or status. Can you imagine him telling a fifty year old white businessman who's yelling "My mother-in-law is dying" to shut his mouth?
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I don't think he should lose his job. Why? Because they'll just fill his position with another cookie-cut white guy with a badge and a gun and a Texas upbringing. Suspend him, dock his pay, but TRAIN him. Don't martyr him-- walk him through that video, minute by minute, burn it into his brain how he made a mistake and can be a better cop. Make him confront his own thinking and instincts. Don't let him patrol alone for a while-- monitor him. It just seems to me like another "bad apple" scapegoat when the system of training is at issue as well.
You know - I kind of like this idea. Didn't they already say the video would end up a police academy training video? Since there wasn't any violence involved, this may well be the best course of action for this officer. Not only could a sub-par but salvageable cop be rehabilitated, so to speak, but it could be part of a larger movement towards rehabilitation of the police department as a whole.
I'll second all the folks who have said this may be more of a dickhead cop issue than a race issue. I have no idea whether race played a factor here, but as a petite blonde white chick, I've had my share of run-ins with cops on power trips, too. Certainly nothing this bad, and most of the cops I have dealt with have been very professional and polite. But I think certain types of assholes tend to be attracted to certain types of professions, and the police force and the military tend to get the sadistic bullies, just like medicine tends to get the megalomaniacs and law tends to get the liars. (I'm a lawyer, b/t/w, but hopefully not one of the slimy ones). Paying cops higher salaries might encourage more people to apply and give the police force the ability to be more selective with their applicants, but it is still likely that a larger-than-average percentage of the people who apply for a job where they get to carry a big gun and a billy club are going to be bullies. Unless they do some kind of psychological screening to keep those kinds of people out, higher salaries alone won't fix the problem.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but how often does the petite blonde chick end up a bullet riddled corpse?
Everyone's had a run-in with a dickhead cop; even white middle-class, middle-aged me. The question is, what's at stake when you're number comes up?
Point taken, but I wasn't referring to police brutality in general; just to this particular situation. I don't think it is clear that the cop was racist or that Mr. Moats was stopped because he was black. What IS clear is that this particular cop was a huge jerk, and many white people have had run-ins with cops who are huge jerks, which makes me doubt that he would have "thrown on his lights and led a caravan to the hospital," as one commenter said, if the couple had been white.
I think you're missing the bigger picture. Until unarmed white people start dying in a hail of police bullets often enough that I can think of one incident as opposed to the three I can think of off the top of my head since I started living in NYC, any encounter between a black citizen is and a dickhead cop is de facto racist -- the odds that it will end in tragedy are vastly skewed by the color of the citizen's skin.
If what you're saying is that being pulled over by a dickhead cop, whether he's actually racist or not, is a worse/more frightening experience for a black man than for a white woman because of the reasonable fear that the cop is racist and violent, then yeah, I can see that.
Very true. And that is the problem when it comes to incidents that do involve race. There is a fine line between the person being merely a jerk and whether or not their is actually systematic racism that is occurring. Statistics would help -but reporting incidents like these is dicey. As a black woman if I am pulled over by a cop- do I consider a negative situation as racial or just something that I took too personally, or is the cop just a jerk in general? And then will reporting something like this put a label on me as being some angry/hysterical black woman? Will it affect how cops treat me in the future? No easy answer.
Definitely- My guess is that there's not only a fine line between general bullying and racism, but which is the cause of the other isn't always clear. I'm sure there are some people who are perfectly nice to everybody else but turn into bullies when they are dealing with ethnic minorities. However, some cops just want to pick on somebody and will find any excuse to do it, whether it's race, gender, physical size, haircut, whatever, or no excuse at all. I don't think either of those types of people belong in the police force.
The first minute or two the cop was acting like a jerk, but I kind of get it. I'm sure he hears excuses all the time. But eventually when the nurse comes down and says the mother-in-law is dying right now?!?
You can't have any sympathy for him at that point. ARRRRGHHHHH.
And what's even worse is that the person who stayed behind with Moats to make certain he didn't end up dead was the MIL's father. Is there greater pain than having a child die? Maybe only the pain of not getting to say goodbye because some butthole cop decides it isn't that important.
As a white guy, I've always been scared of cops. Some of it was personal experience: getting chased and frisked as a teenager; having a stupid narc standing in the school hallway watching me when I went to my locker; having them do nothing when I got jumped by a guy with a baseball bat; watching them twist evidence around after some people crashed a friend's party and trashed his house.
Thankfully, as an adult, my interactions with the police have been more positive. But here in San Francisco (where I live), I have seen them kicking the crap out of *white* people right in front of me at protests several times. Tons of witnesses; often on video; in a city where cops have a reputation for brutality; and in a city that pays out huge settlements for said brutality - cops will still beat up people who have enough power to get them in trouble.
I once read something written by a guy who said he joined the army because he wanted to kill people and he wanted to be around like-minded people. There's certainly a percentage of people who become cops (like one of my old hockey coaches, who said hitting someone in the head with a nightstick was 'better than sex') because they like pushing people around and beating people up, and they will push their opportunities to do so as far as possible.
To me, the key factor in a lot of these cases isn't so much race as it is the cop's perception of what he can get away with, who he can abuse and how far, etc. Race obviously plays a factor in that calculation--black people tend to have less power in this country than whites, there certainly are racist cops, cultural differences can further distort already-confusing encounters--but it's not the only factor. I think we do ourselves a bit of a disservice in discussing these incidents from a racial standpoint alone, as if it's solely a black problem, or something that the ongoing purge of racism from our society will solve. Like you, I'm white, and though I'll grant that I obviously don't have nearly as much cause for it as non-whites, I'm scared of getting beat/shot/tazered by the police too, cus I know (and more to the point, they know) that there's not shit I can about it after the fact.
None of this hand-wringing changes the fact that 80% of violent cries are committed by black males.
THAT doesn't change the fact that 93.7854326666% of un-cited statistics are just made up to make opinion seem like fact!
Yeah ok please provide a link to whichever tinfoil hat website you got that bogus statisic from. We all want to laugh at you.
So, by your logic, all the hand wringing about the Duke lacrosse players being falsely accused doesn't change the fact that most campus rapes occur in frat houses, so who cares if they're innocent, right? And all the hand-wringing about "reverse discrimination" (qualified white guys losing jobs to an under-qualified minorities) doesn't change the fact that most good jobs go to white guys, right?
Maya - Definitely think this situation was egregious and the stat above is unfounded. However, I think this situation is a little different than the ones you mentioned.
The officer relied on instinct and has to react instantly, which I think is more likely to be based on prejudices. It may not even be racial prejudices, but could be from experience about the type of person that takes a significant amount of time to pull over. The situations you mention above don't require instant reaction, so I personally expect individuals to consider their response more carefully.
Banned. Please don't feed trolls guys.
Banned? TNC, I'm not sure where I went wrong. I'm sorry for not falling in line and agreeing with you. Censorship sucks.
I basically stated the underlying concept of Gladwell's Blink. I wasn't saying the officer was right, I was just saying that his reaction should not be unexpected.
As time elapses, we should expect more and expect justice. Such as when time passed and then hospital staff came out, that was the officer's chance to do the right thing. That's the wtf moment. I think the hand wringing about Duke well after the fact was unjust to the players, because the truth was out there. I don't really have a problem with how people reacted initially to the incident, but after people were continuing to pursue them despite the facts, that is the wtf moment.
Not you. Arrowsmith.
Update: Cop who stopped NFL player in hospital lot resigns
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-nflplayer-stopped&prov=ap&type=lgns.
Question: Should he quit, or should he just apologize, learn his lesson and be an example of how to change your ways?