Police in Cambridgeshire, UK, are investigating a viral video of one of its police officers pulling over a Black driver in Ely.
The video, which was recorded five years ago, shows two Cambridgeshire Constabulary police officers in the middle of a traffic stop in the English city.
Videos by VICE
“The reason I’ve stopped you is when you came out of the barns – no offence to you, but you’re a black male, OK, I’m not going to lie to you,” one officer tells the driver.
“That’s racist, you’ve stopped me,” the motorist immediately replies.
The same officer continues: “In this area, we have a number of drug dealers – I’m not saying you’re a drug dealer – they come up from other areas and don’t live anywhere around here.”
The police officer explains that they decided to stop the driver after his car “disappeared” up the road.
He continues: “I’m not accusing you of being a drug dealer, I’m not accusing you of being a criminal, but if I don’t stop people, how can I do my job? […] In this area, we have a number of people that come up to this area that are young black males who deal drugs.”
The driver then asks: “If I was a white person and I had driven past you, you wouldn’t have turned around and come after me, would you?”
“Maybe not today,” the officer says, before maintaining that he has “stopped a lot of white people”, adding: “I’m not a racist, but I’m doing my job.”
The driver in the video – who wishes to remain anonymous – told CambridgeshireLive that he decided to upload the video to Facebook over the weekend after hearing about the George Floyd protests on the news. “I didn’t report it, mainly because I was scared, I guess, because obviously I felt like they were targeting me. I didn’t want any reprisals or repercussions or any more problems from them, really. We’ve had the radio on at work, and that’s how I heard about what had happened in the United States. I thought now’s the time to get it out there and do something about it.”
The Facebook video has since been watched over 84,000 times, and reposted on other social media platforms. One Twitter upload has been watched 2.5 million times.
Ely East councillor Matt Downey tweeted: “If you don’t believe that people in Cambridgeshire get racially profiled, watch this video. An officer outright admits to stopping a man just because he’s black and wouldn’t have stopped him if he was white.”
Cambridgeshire Constabulary told VICE UK that it was unable to comment on the video as it is now the subject of a formal complaint and is being investigated by its professional standards department.
