Fort Lauderdale, FL — An infuriating video has surfaced this week showing a police officer harassing an innocent motorist over the darkness of his window tint—and likely his skin color too. The detainment and extortion of innocent motorists for dark windows is a terrible injustice, as TFTP has consistently reported, which makes this video twice as infuriating. During the stop, the man filming the interaction caught the cop on camera violating his rights while abusing his own K9 partner too.
According the person who posted the video, who goes by the name DePastor Yoo, on Facebook, he was driving home Saturday night when he was targeted by an officer with the Wilton Manors Police Department because his tint was suspected of being too dark.
Our attempts to reach DePastor have been unsuccessful, however, the video is self explanatory.
In the land of the free, if police feel that your window tint is too dark, they will claim the right to extort money from you. If you resist this extortion, police will claim the right to kidnap or kill you. Unfortunately, in the land of the free, these instances happen so frequently that they are often caught on video too.
As the video below shows, after the officer initiated the stop, he went on a fishing expedition with his K9. Although the Fourth Amendment is supposed to prevent people from unreasonable search and seizure, the United States Supreme Court ruled that using drug dogs during lawful traffic stops does not constitute a search as an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in illegal contraband within a vehicle.
The Supreme Court case of Illinois v. Caballes laid out this most unconstitutional practice and paved the way for a K9 to be deployed during most traffic stops. This is what we see in the video below.
During a traffic stop in which an officer deploys their K9, if the dog alerts to the vehicle, it gives the officer probable cause to then search the vehicle.
As TFTP has reported at length, the overwhelming majority of the time, K9 officers will alert on vehicles whether drugs are present or not.
In many cases, police dogs are trained with positive reinforcement if they are able to find contraband—a situation that will obviously lead to false positives. Police deny that this tactic is used in training, despite the fact that it is known to be commonplace.
In 2014, we reported on the high-profile case of Timothy Young. Young was pulled over for failure to use his turn signal when a police K-9 was said to have alerted to his vehicle. After police found no evidence of drugs in his car or on his person, he was then handcuffed and driven to a hospital an hour away. During this forced visit to the hospital, Young was x-rayed and sodomized in search of non-existent substances.
Luckily for DePastor, he escaped this traffic stop without being forcibly sodomized in search of non-existent drugs. The K9, however, was not so lucky.
After walking the K9 around DePastor’s vehicle in search of non-existent drugs, the dog never alerted. Enraged that he now lost his ability to continue the traffic stop by searching DePastor’s car, the officer snapped and took his aggression out on the innocent dog.
After he rounds the last corner of the car and the K9 didn’t alert, the officer fiercely jerks the dog’s collar with all of his weight to let out his frustration. This action now has the online community enraged.
Many people are speaking out and are asking for the officer in the video below to be charged with assault on a police officer. Indeed, if a citizen was seen treating a police K9 in this manner, rest assured they would like be facing some sort of accountability.
Hopefully this story also helps to expose the insidious nature of pulling people over for dark windows too, as other folks, like 21-year-old Christopher Ballew, have been severely beaten or even killed over how much sunlight they let in their cars.
The Free Thought Project reached out to the Wilton Manors Police who noted that they were aware of the video and are investigating it. They gave no other details. The department has since pulled down their Facebook page as they are likely being flooded with negative comments.
If you’d like to contact the department, you can do so by phone: (954) 390-2150.
