Tyreek Hill wouldn’t keep his sports car window down when a police officer asked him to do so after the Miami Dolphins star receiver was pulled over for a traffic violation before Sunday’s NFL season opener at Hard Rock Stadium.
Body-cam footage of the incident that quickly escalated into Hill being forcibly removed from his black McLaren 720S, pushed to the ground face first and handcuffed by officers was released by the Miami-Dade Police Department.
Hill was pulled over for speeding en route to the stadium by an officer on a motorcycle. The footage shows the officer knocking on the car’s driver’s side window and telling Hill to put it down. Hill complied and handed the officer his driver’s license while repeatedly telling the officer not to knock on his window. Hill put the window back up and the officer responded by raising his voice and repeatedly telling Hill to keep the window down.
By then other officers had arrived and Hill was pulled from his car and pushed to the ground with an officer placing his knee in Hill’s back while handcuffing him. “When we tell you to do something, you do it. You understand?” one officer said. “You understand? Not what you want, but what we tell you. You’re a little f—— confused.”
Officers led the handcuffed Hill to the sidewalk and one of the officers kicked him.
After the game against the Jacksonville Jaguars — during which Hill scored an 80-yard touchdown and celebrated by placing his hands behind his back while teammate Jaylen Waddle pretended to handcuff him — Hill said he wanted to keep his window up because he was “embarrassed” and didn’t want people in passing cars to recognize him.
“If I let my window down, people walking by, driving by, they’re going to notice that it’s me,” Hill told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday night. “And they’re going to start taking pictures, and I didn’t want to create a scene at all. Like, I just really wanted to get the ticket and then go on about my way.”
One of the officers apparently had no idea Hill was an NFL player.
An officer who was looking at Hill’s driver’s license asked another officer about Hill’s behavior, saying, “Why is he acting up like that? You know who that is right?
“No,” an officer who was off camera replied.
“That’s one of the Dolphins’ star players,” said the officer who had Hill’s license.
“Oh, yeah? F—,” the off-camera officer responded.
The Dolphins issued a statement after the body-cam video was released, saying they were “saddened by the overly aggressive and violent conduct directed towards Tyreek Hill, Calais Campbell and Jonnu Smith,” and adding that “there are some officers who mistake their responsibility and commitment to serve with misguided power.”
A little over a minute elapsed from the time Hill was pulled over and dragged from the car.
“It just went from zero to 60, man, from the moment that those guys pulled up behind me, knocked on my window, it went from zero to 60 immediately,” Hill said Monday in an interview with “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.”
“I was opening my door and I was going to get out, you know what I’m saying, but it felt like they was wanting me to move fast.”
