Tyreek Hill Police Bodycam Video Shows Cops ‘Did Nothing Wrong’: Expert

After reviewing the police body camera footage from Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill’s viral detainment, former Boca Raton Police Chief Andrew J. Scott tells Newsweek, “I don’t think any of the officers did anything wrong.”

On Sunday, Hill, 30, was stopped for an alleged speeding violation en route to Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens. During the stop, he was roughly handcuffed and placed on the ground with several officers around him. Although briefly detained, he was released in time to participate in the season opener against the Jacksonville Jaguars, where he even poked fun at the incident during a touchdown celebration.

Body cam footage released Monday shows officers repeatedly asking the NFLer to roll down his tinted car window, but Hill does not comply and rolls the window up.

“As a well-trained police officer, this is now a potentially dangerous situation for me,” Scott told Newsweek on Tuesday. “I can’t see the driver. He’s not following commands. He’s in a 5000-pound vehicle that he could speed away. Maybe he’s going to grab a weapon. I’m concerned. Let me pull him out and get him onto the ground, and let’s find out what’s going on.”

“The manner in which he was pulled to the ground, to me, is what we’re supposed to do,” said Scott, who has a doctorate in criminal justice and more than 30 years experience in law enforcement. “That portion of the video definitely tells me that the police officers acted in accordance with their training and policy.”

Another segment of the body cam footage shows officers commanding a handcuffed Hill to sit down on the sidewalk. One officer holds Hill’s shoulder while another comes up behind him, grabs him around the back to the front of his chest, and seats him on the pavement.

“Hold on, brah. I just had surgery on my knee! I just had surgery on my knee,” Hill exclaims.

Scott says of the scene, “He [the officer] doesn’t push him down. He doesn’t throw him down. He places him on the sidewalk to make sure that Mr. Hill is complying with what is being requested.”

“Having said all of that, I’m not seeing anything in the body-worn cameras that would cause me to say my officers overreacted or my officers didn’t do what their training suggested that they should do,” he said.

In a press conference after Sunday’s game, Hill addressed the incident, “I wasn’t disrespectful… because my mom didn’t raise me that way, didn’t curse, none of that.”

On Monday, Hill told CNN that he complied with commands to keep his window down and provide his ID but rolled it back up to avoid causing a fan spectacle.

Hill also claimed he was slow to get out of his luxury car due to his knee injuries.

“I was fixing to get out my car because they told me to get out. I was getting out my car, but the way that my car is made, there’s like a dip inside my McLaren,” he said.

However, Scott told Newsweek on Tuesday, “I heard Mr. Hill’s comments when he talked about how his mother taught him to be respectful, and it’s clear that that did not occur during the traffic stop.”

“Had Mr. Hill complied with the officer’s request initially, and kept his window down, and listened to what the officer said, he would have been on his way in a matter of 10 minutes, gotten his citations, and moved on. That did not happen,” said Scott, who testifies across the country on police practices and procedures, including the use of force.

Miami police revealed that one officer involved in the incident has been placed on administrative leave, but have not specified which one. Scott does not believe any more officers in this incident should be placed on leave but does have a “question” about Hill’s teammate Calais Campbell being handcuffed at the scene. Campbell told media on Sunday that he saw Hill in handcuffs on the way to the stadium and pulled over to try and de-escalate the situation.

Body cam footage shows Campbell with his hands up and slowly backing away as officers demand he stand further from the scene.

“The officers had every right to say, ‘Hey, step back, get back, get back,'” Scott explained. “If Mr. Campbell didn’t get back as commanded, throwing on a pair of handcuffs to ensure compliance is not unreasonable, but I didn’t see the entire body one camera clip of how Mr. Campbell ultimately was handcuffed, or why he was handcuffed.”

“Beyond that, no, I don’t think the other officers need to go on administrative leave. I’m not sure which officer was placed on administrative leave, and then for that purpose, I’m not understanding why he was placed on administrative leave,” Scott said.

Newsweek has contacted Miami Dade police and the mayor’s office for comment.

Wrapping up his conversation with Newsweek, Scott was sure to include that “under no circumstances” does he think Hill’s incident was a racist issue as some online have suggested.

“If it was me and I did that, I’d be on that ground as well. If it was you, more likely than not, you’d be on that ground,” he said to the reporter. “If it was Joe Blow the Rag Man – if we behaved in the fashion that Mr. Hill did, we would have been in the same circumstances.”

Stirring Painful Memories

Not everyone agrees with Scott.

Having been through something similar, former professional tennis player James Blake told Newsweek that “it’s sad, but not surprising” to see Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill being detained and forced to the ground by police.

Hill, 30, was handcuffed and pushed onto the pavement Sunday in Miami near Hard Rock Stadium after he was allegedly “uncooperative” while stopped for speeding, according to a Florida police union. Fan-captured video of the incident has gone viral, showing the wide receiver on the highway surrounded by several officers. He claims he was respectful and compliant with officers.

In 2015, Blake, now 44, was standing outside of a New York hotel minding his own business when NYPD Officer James Frascatore, who did not identify himself as a policeman, tackled him to the ground, mistaking him as a suspect in a credit card fraud scheme. The NYPD took away five vacation days from Frascatore as punishment, even though he had been accused of using excessive force four times before the incident with Blake.

Blake’s incident happened nearly a decade ago, but he tells Newsweek that he still thinks about it “way too often,” especially when he sees someone in the news in a similar predicament.

“But there are other times where I’m just playing with my kids, and I think ‘this is one of the most wonderful moments of my life,’ and I think how lucky I am that I wasn’t seriously injured,” Blake said Monday.

Former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III also posted one of the viral videos of the Hill incident to his social media on Sunday, writing “Tyreek Hill should not have been forcibly driven to the ground, handcuffed and handled so aggressively for a minor traffic violation heading into the stadium before the game. Period.”

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