A cell phone video showing a white Jacksonville, Florida, police officer striking a Black man in the face during a February traffic stop before he’s dragged from his car has gone viral, sparked outrage and led to conflicting accounts of the incident from civil rights lawyers and law enforcement.
William McNeil Jr.’s lawyers Ben Crump and Harry Daniels say the video, which McNeil took from inside his car, is a clear depiction of brutality, coming as law enforcement officials – from masked ICE agents to local police officers – have been scrutinized for their use of force, particularly against people of color.
This has been a thing forever here. It’s common(-ish) knowledge to leave your seatbealt on until the cop approaches you. Otherwise they’re allowed to assume that you also weren’t wearing it before the stop and write you a ticket. It’s dumb.
Which sucks for guys, since we usually carry our wallets in our back pocket. So our first instinct is to take off the belt, take out our wallet and have everything ready for the cop when they walk up. Which is a $100 mistake you only make once (hopefully).
And that totally makes sense. If you’ve been pulled over for, say, speeding, and the officer notices that you aren’t wearing your seat-belt then that should get added. But it seems like that would be really easy for the officer to make a mistake or simply lie about as a primary offense. I did look it up and Florida has a primary enforcement law for seat-belts, which means technically they can pull you over for not wearing it without any other reason for the traffic stop. So that sucks. I mean, I want people to wear seat-belts, but that just seems like a statute ripe for abuse.
Oh it’s abused alright. They’re called pretextual stops and they’re basically used to skirt your rights of unreasonable search and seizure.
Despite the fact that SOCTUS has ruled that traffic stops are NOT grounds for further criminal investigations.