Tyreek Hill’s arrest before the Dolphins win over the Jaguars on Sunday — a game flipped on its head thanks to Hill scoring an 80-yard touchdown in the second half — has taken on a life of its own, going from simply a breaking NFL news story on a wild first Sunday of 2024 to a broader cultural debate on the nature of police behavior. The actual citations written for Hill on Sunday will likely fan the flames on that discussion, because the charges are pretty tame.
Jeff Darlington of ESPN (who spends way too much time accidentally ending up near arrested athletes) obtained the citation, which shows the officers involved in pulling Hill over and arresting him got a “visual estimation” of Hill traveling 60 miles per hour in a 45 mile per hour zone and also not wearing a seatbelt.
Both violations, as noted by the citations themselves, qualify as an “infraction that does not require an appearance in court.”
Yes, Tyreek was driving too fast in an area with a decent amount of foot traffic. As the Miami-Dade police union noted, Hill’s rate of speed put other pedestrians at risk. On the other hand, the body cam footage of Hill passing the police officer shows someone driving faster than the rest of the cars but it doesn’t profile as someone putting other people in imminent danger.
Hill, in an interview with NBC News expressed shock at being pulled over and the idea he was speeding aggressively.
“I have no idea. I have no idea. I wasn’t going like 80 or 70 or 60,” Hill told Holt. “It was surprising to me that I got pulled over.”
He was certainly moving faster, but there isn’t any radar available.
Besides this is an instance of someone being yanked out of their car and thrown on the ground, then being aggressively placed in handcuffs, with multiple police officers assisting despite Hill not resisting their efforts at all outside of yelling on his phone to Dolphins head of security Drew Brooks. Meanwhile, Hill’s agent, Drew Rosenhaus, has since said the wide receiver is contemplating litigation against the Miami-Dade Police Department.
Watch the body-cam footage and it’s pretty easy to understand why. Hill said later he wasn’t being “disrespectful” — I think reasonable minds can disagree on whether rolling up a window in a police officer’s face is wise or not. But being yanked from your car and thrown onto the street given the nature of the charges involved is pretty over the top.
The general sense, I think, was we’d find out Hill was doing like 100 miles per hour and being extremely reckless. He was speeding and he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt in a fairly busy area. No doubt he was in the wrong, legally. He probably shouldn’t have spoken to the officers the way he did or kept rolling up his window directly in their faces. Both parties were at fault to a degree here.
But now that we’ve seen the citations, it’s pretty clear this was a fairly routine traffic stop that was drastically elevated by the officers on the scene.
