Video of Tyreek Hill traffic stop sparks new conversations about ...

Martenzie Johnson:

It was a semblance of, here we go again.

I have seen countless versions of this video play out over at least the last decade, at least when I have been an adult and being able to kind of comprehend what's going on. And, again, it's the same thing, where a Black man gets pulled over. It gets escalated because the police seem to want to escalate it.

And then it turns into really violence against that Black person. At least in this case, Tyreek Hill walked away with no injuries, he wasn't shot, he wasn't Tased or anything like that. But, again, it's just been kind of part of the course for what I have seen over the last decade.

Martenzie Johnson:

Oh, for sure.

In that bodycam footage that we just saw, if you kept playing that, you would hear at some point one of their Officers say: "Do you know who that is?"

The other Officer being: "No."

And then he says: "That's a Miami Dolphins football player." And he used it, accidentally, like, oh, I think I messed up.

So that probably led to Tyreek Hill actually being able to go to that game and have a successful game for the Dolphins that day. But, yes, if Tyreek Hill wasn't who he was, if he wasn't a professional football player, if he wasn't a celebrity, that could have been another hashtag that we have seen again over his last decade, plus stemming back to Trayvon Martin.

Martenzie Johnson:

I mean, one, the police union official is doing his job, right? That's what all police officials are going to do in this case. They're going to stand up for their own.

But this idea that, if you don't comply, if you don't follow their orders, they can exact violence on you, that's not part of the job, right? They have a lot of leeway as police Officers. They have qualified immunity. They can get them out of lawsuits. They have powers from the state to shoot and kill people without really any recourse.

They get paid a salary that is much higher than most public service, not to mention the overtime that Officers like that would get from working those games. So the least that they could do is not — the least that they could do is de-escalate situations. That's all we're asking them to do.

And they're saying that, if you don't comply with this, if you don't — if you try to escalate the situation, we will go even further to a point of violently snatching you out of your car, putting you face first into the pavement, driving your — my kneecap into your back and arresting you, just for, again, like you said, a traffic violation.