Grim history of police brutality tells us Tyreek Hill was lucky to walk away unscathed
8 years after Kaepernick's polarizing protest, has sports world regressed to the mean?
I know we needle Tyreek Hill often in this column. He's once-in-a-generation, both as an athlete and a glutton for publicity, a future hall-of-famer who embellishes towering achievements with tall tales, just because he likes the attention. If it's an act, it's tough to tell where the character ends and the Real Tyreek Hill begins, and, for me, it's wearing threadbare.
Still, I have to credit Hill, the Miami Dolphins' all-pro receiver, as the only person directly involved in his Sunday morning run-in with Miami-Dade police who tried to de-escalate the showdown.
The body-cam footage is public now, and it shows Hill face-down on the pavement a few hundred metres from Hard Rock Stadium, handcuffed and surrounded by a quartet of cops, one of whom briefly presses his knee into Hill's spine. I don't know if an image of George Floyd flashed across Hill's mind, but if I were in his position it would have entered mine.
Seconds later the officers yank him to his feet and move him from the road to the sidewalk. Moments after that, one of the officers wraps an arm around Hill's neck. I don't know if Hill heard Eric Garner saying, "I Can't Breathe" in his mind's ear, but I could see the parallels.
From there, in the police department's re-telling, the officer "redirected" Hill to the ground. If you watched the film, you know "dragging" is a more accurate term.
WATCH | Bodycam footage of Tyreek Hill traffic stop reignites questions of police brutality:
Many of us would panic. Hill tried to lower the temperature while Officer Redirect barked in his ear.
"Chill, bruh," he said from a seated position.
The most aggressive officer, 27-year veteran Danny Torres, has been placed on administrative leave; Hill, his agent, and his lawyer want him fired.
Hill's teammates have defended him in public. Calais Campbell risked his own safety to check on Hill at the scene. The Dolphins issued a statement calling the officers' actions "despicable."
Still, I have questions.
Does the pushback against police brutality stop here?
Are any countermoves coming from the NFL? Didn't the league partner with Jay-Z in 2019 to address social justice issues like this?
And are we going to treat Sunday's fiasco as isolated, or as part of a systemic issue with reverberations in a league that's 70 per cent Black?
Eight years after Colin Kapernick first skipped the pre-game anthems to protest police brutality against Black folks, and four years after George Floyd's death focused global attention on the issue, it feels like a regression to the mean for the sports world. It's one more space where the post-Floyd fervour to fight racism has lapsed into apathy.
It's disheartening, but predictable.
WATCH | Officer placed on leave following Hill's detainment:
In June of 2020, I wrote for the Toronto Star that mainstream media's rush to amplify Black voices was welcome, but worried if it was like January at the gym – companies riding a wave of motivation before they fall back into old habits.
And now we're watching in real time as universities and corporations either scale back or discontinue Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, while the acronym DEI has itself become a euphemism for whatever racial slur you care to substitute. If directly attacking U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris' ethnic identity makes your line of questioning racist, labelling her a "DEI hire" lets you pretend you're defending meritocracy.
That attitude shows up in the sports world, where Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl assailed Harris' "wokeness," which, if you're paying attention, is another word people employ to make racist-adjacent statements without being labelled racist themselves.
That kind of plausible deniability is a powerful weapon for the anti-antiracism crowd, and it applies to the Hill incident too.
'Driving while Black'
You could, after all, draw parallels between Hill's dust-up, and PGA star Scottie Scheffler's run-in with Louisville Metro Police on his way to the PGA Championship in May. But Scheffler, unlike Hill, was arrested and booked and made to take mug shots. And Scheffler, unlike Hill, is white. Except if your rebuttal to police roughing up a Black guy is that they also maul white dudes, you've actually strengthened the case that police brutality is a serious problem.
We can't say for sure that the rough treatment Hill received from police was racially motivated, but the incident bears the hallmarks of a Driving While Black scenario.
Police issued a statement saying Hill had been driving dangerously, but the body cam footage shows an officer approaching the driver's side window of Hill's McLaren, and asking about an unfastened seat belt. If that officer looked from a distance through tinted windows and could tell the driver hadn't buckled up, he must have been wearing the world's most powerful pair of Blu Blockers, but I'm not the only Black driver who heard in that seatbelt line an after-the-fact rationale for stopping a Black guy in a luxury car.
WATCH | Hill addresses detainment after Dolphins game on Sunday:
If you've ever been pulled over on a suspected DWB, you likely also have a survival strategy. I keep my hands on the steering wheel while talking with the officers, and announce my every action deliberately, lest they hem me up for making a sudden move.
"My license is in my wallet, which is in my pocket, officer," I'll say. "I'm getting it right now. Ready? OK."
Hill's strategy seemed to involve getting a witness. Video footage shows him on the phone with Drew Brooks, the Dolphins' head of security.
When teammate Calais Campbell shows up, one officer tells him to leave because he's blocking traffic, while another tells him to stay and hand over his driver's license. If he follows either order, he's disobeying the other, and in trouble either way. A classic DWB trap, and a pretext for whatever might come next – screaming, shoving, arrest for resisting arrest, or, in Campbell's case, a citation.
You could argue that Hill's past justifies the rough treatment. He was booted from Oklahoma State University in late 2014 after an arrest for beating up his pregnant girlfriend. But Campbell? He won the NFL's Walter Payton Man of The Year Award in 2019.
Neither man's past really mattered. That they both wound up on the business end of a cop's short temper says everything you need to know. Now they're all co-stars in a viral video, and in an off-the-field drama that'll play out for weeks.
Torres, given the bad press he has generated for his employer, is fortunate he's still employed.
Hill and Campbell, the grim history of police brutality tells us, are even luckier.
