Tyreek Hill’s disturbing detention by police, explained

A brutal police encounter involving Miami Dolphins football player Tyreek Hill is the latest to underscore the enduring problem of violence by law enforcement and how force has been disproportionately used against Black Americans. 

On Sunday morning, officers pulled Hill over for a traffic stop near the Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens and quickly escalated the situation. After Hill handed over his identification, he rolled his window up. When he was slow to roll it back down, an officer violently dragged him out of the car, threw him to the ground, and handcuffed him. 

Hill was then forced to sit on the side of the road while cuffed and received two traffic citations, before getting released prior to the start of that afternoon’s game. Two of Hill’s teammates, Calais Campbell and Jonnu Smith, also stopped their cars after seeing police confront Hill. Because he didn’t respond to a request to move his car, Campbell was also handcuffed and later released without a ticket. 

Hill has told reporters that he was “shell-shocked” by the entire exchange, noting that it went rapidly from “zero to 60.” He spoke, too, of fears that things could have escalated further had he not been a famous football player. “What if I wasn’t Tyreek Hill?” he asked.

The Miami Dolphins lambasted the officers’ “overly aggressive and violent conduct,” in a statement as well, noting that it was “maddening” and “heartbreaking” to “watch the very people we trust to protect our community use such unnecessary force and hostility toward these players.”

The Miami-Dade Police Department released body camera footage of the disturbing encounter on Monday evening, and has placed one of the officers involved on administrative duties. It’s also conducting an Internal Affairs investigation on the incident, Chief Stephanie Daniels said in a statement. 

The violence directed at Hill puts another spotlight on the pervasiveness of police brutality and systemic racism — including the threat that traffic stops can pose to Black Americans. According to a Washington Post tracker, 810 people have been fatally shot by police in 2024, and that figure reached a record high of 1,163 people in 2023. Black Americans are also twice as likely to be killed by police than white Americans, the Post notes. 

“Lord knows, I probably would have been, like, worst-case scenario, I would have been shot or would have been locked up,” Hill told NBC News. 

How police escalated a speeding ticket

Hill was driving to the Dolphins game when police pulled him over for speeding and reckless driving.

An officer knocked on his window and Hill handed him his identification, rolling the window back up after doing so. The officer then knocked on his window multiple times and asked him to keep it down. 

Hill then rolls the window down part way, and the officer states: “Keep that window down, or else I’m going to get you out of the car.” Without waiting for Hill to roll the window further, the officer then says, “As a matter of fact, get out of the car,” and goes to pull the driver’s side door open. 

While he does this, a second officer comes up and starts yelling, “I’ll break that freaking window.” That second officer pulls the door open and starts yanking Hill out of the car, slamming him to the ground. Once he’s on the ground, one of the officers uses his knee to pin Hill to the ground as the two pull his arms behind his back and handcuff him. 

“I’m getting arrested, Drew,” Hill can be heard saying to Drew Brooks, the head of Miami Dolphins’ security. 

“When we tell you to do something, you do it, you understand? Not what you want, but what we tell you,” one of the officers says. “You’re a little fucking confused.”

“Take it easy, bro, do what you gotta do,” Hill says. 

The officers bring Hill up to his feet as two of his teammates — Campbell and Smith — pass by in other cars. “They beating on my window, like he crazy. I didn’t do nothing,” Hill says. 

The officers then try to make Hill sit down on the curb on the side of the road, while he asks them to “hold on.” “I just had surgery on my knee,” Hill says, as one of the officers hooks his arm around his neck and upper body, dragging him to a seated position. “I just had surgery on my knee,” Hill repeats. 

“Really, what a coincidence. Did you have surgery on your ears when we told you to put the window down?” the officer yells. 

“Bro, chill,” Hill says. 

Smith’s car pulls up a few meters down the road and he then gets out and calls someone, saying “They got Tyreek. The cops over here beating on him.” The officers confront Smith and ask him not to park there, and to get back in the car. An officer starts yelling at Smith for his license, and says “or I’m going to lock you up.”

Campbell also parks his car on the side of the road behind the police officers’ motorcycles, and he’s repeatedly yelled at to “leave” or risk the consequences. “If you don’t leave, I’m going to take you to jail,” one officer says. That officer then proceeds to handcuff Campbell and force him to sit down as well. 

While Campbell is down and kneeling, the officer says, “I told you to leave. Why didn’t you leave?” “Because you have my friend in handcuffs,” Campbell says. The officers eventually release Campbell, and then later release Hill. 

“It’s crazy that me and my family had to go through this,” Hill told CNN. 

The regional police union has claimed that officers’ conduct was due to Hill not complying quickly enough with their demands. “Upon being stopped, Mr. Hill was not immediately cooperative with the officers on scene who, pursuant to policy and for their immediate safety, placed Mr. Hill in handcuffs,” Steadman Stahl, president of the South Florida Police Benevolent Association, said in a statement.

“I think the officers felt like I wasn’t doing it on they time, but I was doing it,” Hill said in the CNN interview. After his release, Hill and his teammates went on to play in their season opener against the Jacksonville Jaguars, during which Hill scored a pivotal touchdown. After he scored, Hill put his hands behind his back to mimic being arrested.

The police brutality Hill experienced is widespread

Sunday’s violent traffic stop adds to systemic problems law enforcement has long had with use of force. 

Police use force on at least 300,000 people annually, according to a review by Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research organization. These incidents include the use of stun guns, chokeholds, and dog attacks, among other methods. The data, like the FBI’s, is incomplete, because it only includes information from the police departments that voluntarily responded to a request from Mapping Police Violence.  

The report also determined that Black people were more than three times as likely to be the subjects of force from police officers than white people. “All the inequities we’ve identified about police deadly force appear to be even more extreme in the context of overall police force,” Mapping Police Violence founder Samuel Sinyangwe told The Guardian. As Vox’s Marin Cogan has explained, traffic stops are also a common mode of interaction people have with police, and turn deadly at a concerning frequency, particularly for Black drivers. 

These disparities and violence by police were the subject of massive protests in 2020, following officers’ murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. Such outrage has persisted as police killings, including those of Sonya Massey and Roger Fortson this year, have continued. 

“Let’s make a change,” Hill wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, after the body-camera footage was released on Monday. When asked to elaborate on his post in a CNN interview, he said he was trying to figure out a way forward to address these abuses. “We done tried it all. We done protested. We even took a knee. … So, what’s next?” Hill said.