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Biglaw Partner Intervenes After Witnessing Police Assault A Motorist

Once the lawyer showed up, the officer went from kicking the driver to shaking his hand.

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Deborah Baker-Egozi

When cops started preaching “if you see something, say something,” this is pretty much the opposite of what they intended. The slogan was rolled out as part of the country’s terrorism response and meant to increase white America’s surveillance of people of color. But in this story, when Deborah Baker-Egozi, partner at Am Law 200 firm Greenspoon Marder, witnessed police violently kicking a motorist with his hands up, she used the advocacy skills she’d honed as a seasoned litigator to intervene and defuse the situation.

Baker-Egozi was leaving a courthouse in Miami when she says she heard someone screaming. She says she saw a traffic stop, one where a police officer was screaming in the face of the motorist — of course it was a person of color. The officer was getting increasingly irate, and Baker-Egozi describes the driver as calm and compliant with his hands in the air. According to a report by Law.com, when the encounter transitioned from verbal to physical assault, she felt she had to intervene:

“The kid was totally complying. His hands were in the air, his back was to the officer, and the officer kicked him — hard,” Baker-Egozi said. “He had to gear up to do it.”

She began recording the encounter and, as she describes in a Facebook post, she offered to represent the driver. Once police became aware a lawyer had watched what happened, the entire tenor of the encounter changed. Suddenly friendly and accommodating, the officer went from kicking the driver to shaking his hand:

I witnessed a police officer’s traffic stop walking back from court today. Brown driver, black passenger. The driver had his hands on his head, was following orders and was silent. The cop kicked him and screamed at him for over a minute an inch away from the kid’s face.

I yelled to the kid who got kicked that I would be his attorney if he said yes, and he did. The cop then screamed at me to tell me the kids had only been detained for a routine traffic violation and asked me if I observed them being arrested. I told him that I observed him kicking the driver and that the criteria for hiring counsel is not an arrest. He didn’t know an attorney witnessed his unjustified violence and backed off these poor kids and then started being really nice. He canceled his reinforcements, and by the end was shaking hands being nice to the kids. What if I wasn’t there?

What could have happened if Baker-Egozi had chosen apathy instead of advocacy? The families of Sandra Bland, Philando Castile and far too many others know all too well that a traffic stop can turn deadly when you aren’t white.

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Baker-Egozi says there was no option to ignore what was happening in front of her. She calls it her duty as a lawyer:

“Advocacy has always been part of my M.O.,” or modus operandi, she said. “If a lawyer is walking by and can offer assistance to victims of police violence … it’s our duty to do something about it.”

This shouldn’t be taken as a narrative of a white savior swooping in and saving a person of color. Instead, Baker-Egozi acted the way any human with the skills and experience to stop a bad situation from getting worse should behave. It shouldn’t be that hard or something we need to applaud when someone does the right thing. But here we are — welcome to 2018.

headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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