Smile, motorists and constables, you’re on Candid Camera, and it can bite both ways.
Motorists, it’s your chance to show your rear-end on recording equipment purchased by your tax dollars. And police, well, you know the score. The eye in the sky (and on your lapel) is now always there, for good and for bad.
In the past week, two news stories have shown the impact such videos have on policing. And, for that matter, on being a citizen.
A Cobb County cop is accused of being rude to a motorist and uttering racially inflammatory statements. The first accusation is true. The second? I guess you’d have to read his mind.
A Stone Mountain cop is accused of repeatedly dropping the F-bomb while being rude and threatening to a motorist who happens to work for the DeKalb County Fire Department. Worse, a DeKalb fire captain backed up her story.
Luckily for the second officer, the tape was rolling.
The Stone Mountain incident from last May surfaced this week on FOX-5 News. Stone Mountain police Sgt. Stephen Floyd pulled over DeKalb Fire Capt. Terrell Davis for an expired tag. Davis, who was in his captain’s uniform, quickly drops the name of Public Safety Director Cedric Alexander as some kind of get-out-of-trouble card.
Then comes Krystal Cathcart, a fire department education specialist, who approaches the officer, drops Alexander’s name and then hangs around behind him.
In her complaint to Stone Mountain police — on DeKalb Fire Department stationery — she wrote that Floyd told her, “If you don’t back the (blank) up, I will throw you in the back of my squad car!” Later, he said, “I don’t give a (blank) who you call in your chain of command.”
She was “traumatized” and “felt very threatened.”
Capt. Davis, in his account, also on fire department stationery, also heard an obscenity and wrote that “we were in shock and disbelief with Officer Floyd’s unprofessional and threatening behavior.”
So, let’s roll the tape.
The cop tells her she “can’t stand there.” She asks why. He says, “Because I asked you.” She disputes this, so he says, “You cannot stand there. It’s the last time I’ll ask you or I’ll put you in the back of the car.”
His tone wasn’t exactly inviting her to have coffee, but there were no obscenities and no screaming.
After coming to the PD to watch the tape, Cathcart wrote, “I recant the error of Sgt. Floyd using profanity.” But she still believes he was too aggressive.
Stone Mountain police didn’t call me back, but the oft-mentioned DeKalb Public Safety Director Alexander said there is an investigation going on and “we take this as a serious matter.”
Lawyer Musa Ghanayen, representing Cathcart, said he is waiting to get the full video to analyze the officer’s composure.
In Cobb, a young officer named Maurice Lawson has been at the center of a controversy extending back to last summer when, in an unmarked car, he tailed the county’s only black commissioner late at night, frightening her.
Then in November, a black motorist complained that a cop made racially derogatory statements during a traffic stop. The officer was Lawson.
The incident spilled over to county commission meeting at which Cupid and the always affable Commission Chairman Tim Lee sparred over Cupid’s intentions to create a citizen review board.
The grainy, late-night video shows Lawson stopping Brian Baker, a middle school teacher, for speeding. Baker starts arguing from the start, which gets the cop frustrated. Baker mentions the Gestapo. The cop asks him to sign his ticket. Baker misunderstands, repeatedly asking, “What did you say?”
Finally, Baker says, “Can I go?”
“Leave. Go away,” the cop says. “Go to Fulton County. I don’t care about your people, man, go.”
An obviously irritated driver repeatedly starts asking what he means by “my people.”
“Go to Fulton County, cuz,” the officer responds, continuing to fire up the motorist.
(Lawson contends that “you people” referred to “you argumentative motorists.”)
Is he referring to blacks? Maybe. There are no overt slurs. The motorist sure felt that way.
But in my mind, what is worse is that Officer Lawson — as the argument heats up — asks the angry driver, “You want to step out and talk to me?”
That leaves the incredulous driver asking why Lawson wants him to step out. In his mind, the cop is offering the age-old invitation for him to exit the his vehicle and get his butt kicked. If he gets out, as suggested, nothing good happens.
Cobb police tagged Lawson with a two-week unpaid vacation, which sounds about right. The driver and many civil rights leaders say the officer should be fired and Cobb is avoiding reckoning with racial insensitivity. Law-and-order types are grumbling that the county is caving in to political pressure.
As the driver finally speeds away, Lawson is left telling his comrades at the scene, “I lose my cool, man, every time. Why do I got to deal with (crap) like that? This is the (expletive) America we live in, ain’t it?”
It is. And you’re on tape.
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