Celena Morrison leads the city’s Office of LGBT Affairs and is a top aide to Mayor Cherelle Parker. Morrison’s husband, Darius McLean, runs a community center. Both are Black, while the Pennsylvania state trooper appears to be white.
“I don’t know why he’s doing this,” McLean cries to his wife Saturday morning as she records him being handcuffed, lying on his side, on the shoulder of the elevated highway during a rainstorm. Cars pass by a few feet away.
“It’s ‘cause I’m Black,” McLean says.
“It’s not ’cause you’re Black,” replies the trooper, who leaves McLean handcuffed on the highway shoulder and then moves to arrest Morrison.
The woman complains about him being cuffed in the rain in the video, so he should have had lights on and it was a legal stop even if a lot of people do that. Nobody gets tint tickets in my state but I got one, it doesn’t mean the officer was wrong.
The thing is we don’t really know what happened because there’s no video. A lot of people have misunderstandings of their rights, for example if the officer tried to remove him from the car and he resisted, the Supreme Court has already ruled that police may remove you from a car during a traffic stop. That’s just one hypothetical, there are lots of different ways this could have gone down including the cop just had a huge ego and the guy challenged him verbally in which case the cop wouldn’t have had reason for use of force. But lacking a video, the officer can make up just about whatever story he wants.