Austin, Texas police have released video of a black elementary school teacher being thrown to the ground by a white officer after being pulled over for allegedly driving 15 MPH over the speed limit (!); another white officer subsequently explains to her that whites are afraid of blacks because blacks have “violent tendencies.” You can watch the video above.
Austin police chief Art Acevedo says he is “highly disturbed and disappointed in both the way Ms. King was approached and handled and in the mindset that we saw on display in those videos,” which authorities say were released after prosecutors reviewing a charge of resisting arrest against King flagged officers’ conduct as potentially inappropriate. (The resisting charge was dropped, and King says she has retained counsel and may take further legal action, a step that one imagines may have hastened the department’s response.) The officers involved in the stop are being investigated internally and the county district attorney says the case may also be referred to a grand jury.
In the video, King parks at a Wendy’s and exits her car before officer Bryan Richter approaches her and tells her she’s been stopped for speeding; she says she didn’t realize he had been attempting to pull her over. After a brief exchange, she gets back in her car, at which point Richter tells her to put her feet inside the vehicle so he can close the door, then tells her she isn’t moving fast enough and orders her to get back out. (In his report, Richter wrote that he was worried about the possibility that King could “escape” and that he decided to handcuff her because he was “worried her uncooperative attitude would only escalate.”) At that point a physical struggle begins in which King is thrown to the ground twice; at one point Richter threatens to tase her.
More inflammatory video footage was recorded later when King was in the back of a squad car speaking with another officer named Patrick Spradlin. During the course of a (relatively civil) exchange about race, King asks Spradlin why white people are afraid of black people. His response:
Violent tendencies. I want you to think about that. I’m not saying anything, I’m not saying it’s true, I’m not saying I agree with it or nothing. But 99 percent of the time, when you hear about stuff like that, it is the black community that is being violent. That’s why a lot of white people are afraid. And I don’t blame them.
Asked if he considered his officer’s statements racist, Acevedo responded, “Yes.”
Austin is about a two-hour drive away from Waller County, Texas, where Sandra Bland was found dead of an apparent suicide in jail three days after being pulled over in July 2015 for failing to signal a lane change. (The officer who arrested Bland was fired and has been charged with perjury, and Bland’s mother is pursuing a civil lawsuit against entities involved in the case.)
