Celena Morrison leads the city’s Office of LGBT Affairs and is a top aide to Mayor Cherelle Parker. Morrison’s husband, Darius McLean, runs a community center. Both are Black, while the Pennsylvania state trooper appears to be white.
“I don’t know why he’s doing this,” McLean cries to his wife Saturday morning as she records him being handcuffed, lying on his side, on the shoulder of the elevated highway during a rainstorm. Cars pass by a few feet away.
“It’s ‘cause I’m Black,” McLean says.
“It’s not ’cause you’re Black,” replies the trooper, who leaves McLean handcuffed on the highway shoulder and then moves to arrest Morrison.
Bad things happen in Philadelphia.
I watch a few police accountability YouTubers, and honestly that video is worthless if it doesn’t show the context of why the police officer was arresting them. Often, police officers use force when making arrests, a lot of the time they overstep their legal bounds but they don’t receive any repercussions of their actions because of qualified immunity and other protections
But the cops who behave like that, they’ll do it to anybody that even slightly disrespects them, regardless of race or whatever else. Initially I just watched the video but after reading the article, there is no body cam video and the haven’t released dashcam. Dashcam likely wouldn’t have any audio.
Always record your interactions with the police, especially if you want to argue with them. If you want to hold police accountable you have to prove they did wrong. Without evidence it’s your word against theirs and that won’t get you very far.
In the cellphone video posted online, the trooper says he stopped Morrison for tailgating and not having lights on.
Cops using not having lights on at 9AM to pull you over is kinda bullshit even on low visibility days. But if it was a rainy day maybe. Having spent 20 years in Seattle, you could arrest half the city for no lights on and tailgating on a rainy morning. So if they weren’t driving dangerously, beyond tailgating it seems suspicious that this ends in arrests.
But because of the multiple threats to taze, it makes me think this officer was out of bounds. You either use the disabling weapon before something happens or you don’t. Threats to use it always seem to me to be flags that the person can’t do their job. Probably very lucky they didn’t get the; tazer pulled on them or worse, the gun.
The two arrested people were in two different cars?
apparently pulled over in a second vehicle and was arrested after allegedly arguing with the officer.
Bizarre all around. Why didn’t the officer get backup on the scene if they felt in danger?
because they’re fascists and the harassment and abuse of power is the point. we have to get rid of the cops to stop this kind of thing
The woman complains about him being cuffed in the rain in the video, so he should have had lights on and it was a legal stop even if a lot of people do that. Nobody gets tint tickets in my state but I got one, it doesn’t mean the officer was wrong.
The thing is we don’t really know what happened because there’s no video. A lot of people have misunderstandings of their rights, for example if the officer tried to remove him from the car and he resisted, the Supreme Court has already ruled that police may remove you from a car during a traffic stop. That’s just one hypothetical, there are lots of different ways this could have gone down including the cop just had a huge ego and the guy challenged him verbally in which case the cop wouldn’t have had reason for use of force. But lacking a video, the officer can make up just about whatever story he wants.
