When Tae-Ahn Lea made a wide turn driving through Louisville, Kentucky a police officer pulled him over. Fair enough, right? Wrong.
Officers took things a step further when they asked the teen to get out the car.
Tae-Ahn, who was on the phone with his mother at the time yelled, "Mama, they are taking me out of the vehicle!" That’s when officers proceeded to search him. Tae-Ahn got upset, asking officers why they were overreacting. One went as far to tell him he “had an attitude” and to stop clenching his fists!
Even worse, they put Tae-Ahn in HANDCUFFS! The Courier Journal reports, “Experts on policing, including some former officers, used words such as ‘deplorable’ and ‘depressing’ to describe the stop.” And that’s an understatement!
Police Chief Steve Conrad said that officers don’t have any policy on aggressive stops. However, Courier Journal analysis also found that the police appeared to have violated their own policy by “failing to identify themselves and failing to ask if there was a legitimate reason for what the driver did.”
Tae-Ahn Lea has civil and human rights just like we all do. What the police did to him was clearly racially motivated. Just because we deal with this all the time doesn’t make it acceptable. The officers involved need to be reprimanded.