That’s a traffic stop?
He’s still alive, but it was a near thing.
A second lieutenant in the US army is suing two Virginia police officers over a traffic stop last December in which the officers drew their guns, pointed them at him and used a slang term to suggest he was facing execution before pepper-spraying him and knocking him to the ground.
Body camera footage shows Caron Nazario, who is Black and Latino, dressed in uniform and with his hands held in the air outside the driver’s window as he tells the armed officers he is “honestly afraid to get out” of his SUV.
But they must have had a good reason for the traffic stop, right?
No.
Daniel Crocker, a Windsor police officer, radioed that he was attempting to stop a vehicle with no rear license plate and tinted windows. He said the driver was “eluding police” and he considered it a “high-risk traffic stop”, according to a report included in the court filing.
He wasn’t eluding police, he was heading for a place with lights, so that they couldn’t shoot him in the dark.
Another officer, Joe Gutierrez, was driving by when he heard Crocker’s call, saw him attempting to stop the SUV and decided to join the stop. Gutierrez acknowledged that Nazario’s decision to drive to a lighted area happens to him “a lot, and 80% of the time, it’s a minority”, Arthur said, quoting the officer.
Gee I wonder why.
The lawsuit says that by the time the two officers reached Nazario’s SUV, the license plate was visible in the rear.
In other words they had no reason to stop him.
Nazario drove to a gas station where, according to the lawsuit, the officers drew their guns and pointed them at Nazario. The officers attempted to pull Nazario out of his vehicle while he continued to keep his hands in the air. Gutierrez pepper-sprayed Nazario multiple times.
“I don’t even want to reach for my seatbelt, can you please … My hands are out, can you please – look, this is really messed up,” Nazario stammered, his eyes shut.
The officers shouted conflicting orders, telling him to put his hands out the window while telling him to open the door and get out, the lawsuit says. At one point, Gutierrez told Nazario he was “fixin’ to ride the lightning”, a reference to the electric chair and a line from The Green Mile, a film about a Black man facing execution.
Nazario got out of the vehicle and asked for a supervisor. Gutierrez responded with “knee-strikes”, knocking him to the ground, the lawsuit says. The two officers struck Nazario multiple times, then handcuffed and interrogated him. The stop was captured on Nazario’s cellphone and cameras worn by Crocker and Gutierrez, according to the lawsuit.
All this when they had no reason to stop him in the first place.
The video is stomach-turning.
Terrifying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY
So bad.
That should have been a “ticket” conversation at the driver’s window, with a “Sorry, at first I didn’t see your rear license plate. That was the reason I pulled you over, no rear license plate. Now I see that it is there. I apologize. You won’t be ticketed and you are free to go.”
There was NO REASON for what happened there. It’s heart-stoppingly frightening. I can’t even imagine.
It’s also the panicky ‘control’ that officers are drilled into exerting. Armed men screaming incoherent demands. Often contradicting each other in their individual panic. Almost any ‘police tape’ demonstrates that this is normal behavior for American police.
John,
Yeah, I’m always unsettled by those shock and awe tactics, even when they’re effective at stopping something bad happening.
I know it’s a cliché to think of the British bobby ambling up to calm a fraught situation by chatting away about the suspect’s old mum, but I’ve seen British police use simple de-escalation techniques very effectively in some very hairy situations. It’s not always appropriate and gun threat is a lot lower here, but I find it hard to believe that shock and awe should be the go-to opening gambit, as videos of US police malpractice suggest it is (a biased sample, I am sure).
I’m by no means expert in that kind of security, but I have had training in negotiation. As I was rambling about in another thread, negotiation is about creating options (Sun Tzu’s Golden Bridge). Shock and Awe is about taking options away. Both have merit but I’d much prefer it if police tried the former first.