More. . .

This page has a YouTube series with the traffic stop.

Here's an editorial. And there are quite a few other stories out there.
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Officer's actions at hospital damage public trust, undercut colleagues

02:32 PM CDT on Thursday, March 26, 2009

It took 13 minutes for Dallas police Officer Robert Powell to shame his profession and his department, to give the city an embarrassing black eye and to set off an ugly, sullen public argument about cops and race.

Pretty fast work. But if you watch the 13-minute dash-cam video of Powell bullying and lecturing a driver whose mother-in-law was dying in a nearby hospital room, it seems to last forever.

It's painful viewing. You can feel Ryan Moats' helpless desperation as the minutes tick past.

You share his silent rage at this officious cop who is purposely detaining him as the precious minutes tick away.

You experience his disbelief that, in what is literally a life-and-death circumstance, the policeman cares only about making a show of who's the boss here, of who holds the high poker hand of ultimate authority.

You feel the enormous effort it must cost Moats to maintain his self-control, even though he is rightfully emotional and distraught.

It's too bad they don't have a screening process for this mindset at the outset, some police-academy Rorschach test that reveals which of these earnest rookies will turn into a petty street tyrant once equipped with badge and gun. Powell may have technically acted within the scope of his authority, but he did a lot of damage.

Moats, a Frisco resident and NFL running back, was held in a hospital parking lot while his mother-in-law passed away.

Even though hospital personnel told Powell that the woman, Jonetta Collinsworth, was dying, he was unsympathetic.

He treated Moats – who had run a red light while rushing to the hospital – as if he were a criminal. Worse, perhaps, he lectured him as though he were a child.

"Attitude's everything," he loftily catechized, finally wrapping up this long, long lesson in domination and control. "All you had to do was stop, tell me what was going on. More than likely, I would have let you go."

Hey, that would have been big of him, but it was too late. Jonetta Collinsworth, by then, was dead.

We trust police officers with a great deal beyond the authority to enforce the law. We give them a measure of discretion, the leeway to balance enforcement and compassion. We credit them with having enough street sense to make judgment calls, to consider the circumstances surrounding events.

Surely we expect them to know when somebody needs a lecture, and when they need a break.

A man who runs a light and is slow to pull over because he's trying to get his wife to the bedside of her dying mother is not in the same category with a smart aleck who needs a little verbal smack down for his cavalier treatment of the law. How hard is that to grasp?

And, as miserable fate would have it, Moats and his family are black, while Powell is white.

You may not believe that race didn't play any role in this encounter, but you're not going to change the minds of those who would believe otherwise.

What Powell has done is undercut all his colleagues who are above this kind of trivial abuse. He has reinforced the worst suspicions of those who automatically assume white cops will not give a black man a fair shake, that they take a malicious pleasure in humiliating prosperous, professional civilians of color.

Powell has made the job of those anxious to assure the public that most officers aren't like that a great deal more difficult. Every time he told Moats — who was desperately trying to explain his situation — to "shut your mouth," he dealt his own colleagues a setback.

His betrayal goes far beyond Ryan Moats.