Justice, Police

Time For A Close Read On The Crime 'Driving While Black'

If you really look at the excuses, you see why driving while black is such a pervasive 'crime.'

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There’s a viral police video going around where the unarmed black person didn’t get shot, and for that we should be thankful. Escaping the clutches of the American police force with your life is no small mercy.

Florida state attorney Aramis Ayala — the only black Florida state attorney, it should be noted — was pulled over by Orlando police. After they stopped her for no good reason, they started making up reasons for the stop. Their ex-post-facto crap was caught on video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFWJc5AXi8A

The cops say that they ran her plates, and “nothing came up.” When Ayala asked why they ran her plates, the cops said that they just do that sometimes. Then they said that her windows were tinted. It does not appear her windows are tinted in violation of Florida law, but they threw that out there too. Literally, they told her, “Also, the windows are really dark. I don’t have a tint measure, but that’s another reason for the stop.”

The video is making the rounds because, I don’t know, white people must literally think we’re lying when we talk about “driving while black.” They need to see it for themselves, I suppose, as simply BELIEVING BLACK PEOPLE is too much to ask.

Once Orlando police got their act together, they released an official statement to justify their racially biased stop. I’m more interested in the statement than the video, because the statement is as close as we’ll get to an official rationalization for why police think it’s no big deal to unfairly stop black people who happen to be driving. From CNN:

The Orlando Police Department allows the running of tags “for official business only,” a practice “done routinely on patrol,” the agency said in a statement.

“In regards to the video, which was released by the Orlando Police Department last month, the officers stated the tag did not come back as registered to any vehicle. As you can see in the video, the window tint was dark, and officers would not have been able to tell who, or how many people, were in the vehicle,” the agency said.

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Even Ayala says that, under Florida law, the stop was probably “lawful.” She is a lawyer, after all.

The problem, as usual, is not that “the law” is racist, it’s that the people enforcing it are. A close read on OPD’s self-serving statement reveals the racism that “race-neutral” laws allow for.

  • Orlando Police Department allows the running of tags “for official business only.” The cops on the scene told Ayala that running plates is how they determine if cars are stolen, “and that sort of thing.” But you should have some reason to believe that a car is stolen, or else you’re just running plates on every single car that passes by, which we know they don’t do. The reason to believe that a car might be stolen becomes: a black person is driving it. That’s what triggers the plates being run, which can trigger a whole host of other things. I drive a Cadillac specifically because I know white cops will believe a black guy owns the car. That’s my world.
  • [A] practice “done routinely on patrol.” Again, OPD is saying that’s it’s okay to zap people’s plates not randomly, but “routinely.” That “routine” is racially biased, is all.
  • “In regards to the video, which was released by the Orlando Police Department last month” Honestly, the cops don’t think that stopping black people for being black is wrong. They think people freaking out about it means that they don’t know what police work is. Every time you ask why an officer was racist towards the black community, you should think, “Well, why did Donald Trump Jr. tweet out his emails?” They don’t think they’re doing anything wrong.
  • “[T]he officers stated the tag did not come back as registered to any vehicle.” Once you start running tags, you’re going to start uncovering weirdness. If you disproportionately run the tags on black drivers, you’re going to disproportionately find reasons to stop black drivers. We’d actually be better off as a black community if EVERYBODY’S tags got run, automatically, at every opportunity, and people were pulled over accordingly. But white people would never stand for that kind of state intrusion.
  • “As you can see in the video, the window tint was dark” Here, OPD is trying to give the impression that tinted windows are a violation. This, my friends, is a dog-whistle. They want to leave the impression that black people get stopped because they are more likely to have sweet tinted windows, even though there is no statistical evidence that they do. But that’s only part of the fallacy. The officers on the scene admitted that they did not have a gauge to measure the tint on her windows, and OPD is NOT arguing that her windows were illegally tinted. Tinted windows is not why they stopped her, but OPD is just throwing it out there for anybody biased enough to care.
  • “[O]fficers would not have been able to tell who, or how many people, were in the vehicle,” And now we come to it. Their ultimate response to charges of racial profiling is the suggestion that they couldn’t even see who was driving. We are supposed to believe that they did not know the race of the woman whose plates they ran for no reason, when they pulled her over for no reason, because her perfectly legal windows were too tinted for them to see.

The OPD story only adds up if you are willing to make ALL the assumptions in their favor. To make all of the assumptions in their favor, you have to be a willfully ignorant simpleton.

The stop was “lawful” because it is lawful for cops to pull over black people, and then invent the reasons for doing so later. The cops on the scene tried to explain that to Ayala; Orlando police is trying to explain it to the rest of the world.

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The law allows the cops to pull over black people for any reason. It is therefore indistinguishable from being able to pull over black people for no reason at all. This is how driving while black becomes a criminal act, if you do it in front of the wrong cop.

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

Earlier:

To Stop Police Brutality, Maybe We Have To Teach White People How To Read? Or Something?

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