Today, a Black family subjected to a humiliating and terrifying hour-long detention during a traffic stop by the Montgomery County Police Department ("MCPD") took a stand against police misconduct by filing suit in federal district court in Greenbelt, Maryland, charging MCPD with a pattern of stopping Black and Brown motorists for minor traffic infractions and prolonging those stops to "fish" for evidence of some crime - any crime - without any individualized suspicion of wrongdoing.
Vincent Miller and Sharon Faulk-Foster-the car's driver and passenger-are represented by the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs (WLC), the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland (ACLU), and several pro bono attorneys. Their case challenges practices that violate the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution and Mr. Miller's and Ms. Faulk-Foster's rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
On the pretext of an alleged "windshield obstruction," police stopped the family as they were in the process of moving a grandmother into her new home. The family gave the police no reason to suspect any wrongdoing. Yet, despite having no just cause to do so, MCPD officers prolonged this stop for a minor traffic infraction into an hour-long ordeal involving half a dozen officers, a K-9 search of the car, handcuffs, and invasive physical searches, creating a humiliating public spectacle on a busy road. The officers on the scene, including supervisors, escalated the situation even though they found no evidence of any crime, in clear violation of the family's Fourth Amendment rights.
The officers' conduct was captured on body cameras, which show a superior officer "training" a junior officer to use methods that she characterized as "ridiculous" to try to induce the driver to consent to the search of his car. The body camera footage shows the supervising officer asking a third officer who had just arrived on the scene to "un-fuck up" the situation when she realized her efforts had failed to find any contraband. The videos show officers scheming to come up with some after-the-fact reason to justify searches of the car. When they finally did search the car, they found nothing. Excerpts from the videos from the officers' body worn-camera are available here.
{{file|t=ueJqn_1556986064}}
↧