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In reply to the discussion: Black man righteously shames white cop who pulls him over [View all]Lee-Lee
(6,324 posts)The idea that the cop ran the tag before getting out and got a return is a huge assumption. Your claim that it is "standard police procedure" is total conjecture on your part since there are thousands of agencies out there and every one has its own procedures.
The truth is he may or may not have had a return on that tag when he got out. He may or may not have had an MDT to run it himself, most officers still don't in this country, so he likely radioed it in. If he got the answer back before getting out depends on a huge number of factors- how busy his dispatchers were, how much radio traffic was occupying the channel, and how fast the DMV system was returning the info. When I was doing the job it wasn't uncommon for the system to take 2-5 minutes or more to return a result and there were often periods overnight where the system was taken down for maintenance where we couldn't get any return. We would call the tag in as we we turned on the blue lights and sometimes we would have the run back before we got out of the dispatchers were not busy and the system was running smooth. Sometimes we didn't and got out before that came back because you don't just sit there forever waiting for that to come back.
As for him seeing he is black- it's actually pretty hard to determine the race of a person ahead of you in a car on the road with headlights and blue lights flashing. Try it next time you drive at night and when you pull up behind people in the dark- you will notice everyone just looks like a shadow and you can see shapes and movement, but you don't see enough to determine things like race.
What you can see is movements. It's just as likely that he saw movements that could have possibly been the man reaching for something or trying to hide something and reacted to that than than that he saw a black man and just decieded to pull his gun because he's a huge racist- in fact far more likely that it was a reaction to the mans actions. You seem to totally ignore that there could be perfectly justified reasons based on the drivers behavior (that we don't know because all before was conveniently edited out) and you leap straight to calling the man a racist based on no evidence and all assumptions.
What if the driver did reach around under the seat of another suspicious way for some reason, soy to try and set his camera up to make his video for World Star? If that happens are you still going to declare its racist?
For the record in my department procedure and SOP was if you pulled someone over and they started reaching for things or making movements that could be reaching for a weapon you drew your handgun and kept it by your side or aimed it depending on your judgement. It's every bit reasonable to assume that could be the case here at least as equally possible as your explanation that the man is just a racist who likes to point guns at black people. In reality it's the far more likely explanation.