When cops act like 19th-century Night Riders, everybody loses

Ayear ago, 19-year-old Jaylan Butler took a selfie in front of a “Buckle Up, It’s the Law” sign near the Interstate 80 rest stop in East Moline, Ill.

Jaylan and his fellow members of the Eastern Illinois University swim team were returning from a competition in Sioux Falls, S.D., when their bus pulled over before the last push home to Charleston, Ill., several hours south of Chicago.

After stretching and validating his existence on social media, Jaylan noticed flashing lights headed in his direction. It was shortly after 8 p.m. when he began his slow walk back to the swim team’s bus.

What happened next is so ingrained in the American narrative that we scarcely need video to picture it anymore. As it turns out, there is no police video of the event — only the testimony via lawsuit filed by Jaylan Butler and the pro-forma denials of the officers involved.

In the American Civil Liberties Union suit filed on Jaylan’s behalf in U.S. District Court in January, officers from East Moline and Hampton police departments, two deputies from the Rock Island Sheriff’s Office and two unidentified officers approached him with guns drawn in “search-destroy-mode,” according to the bus driver who witnessed the whole thing.

As soon as Jaylan saw the guns, he knew what to do. He was a disciplined athlete who knew instinctively that the only way he would see the next day would be to make himself as nonthreatening as possible to six officers who compensated for their fear of black men with a willingness to kill him at the first provocation.

Jaylan didn’t resist. He raised his hands to show they were empty. He dropped his cellphone so that even the most paranoid officer would clearly see it wasn’t a lethal weapon they would have to invent on their incident reports if they chose to shoot him anyway. He dropped to his knees even before being ordered to do so by profanity shouting cops.

It was humiliating and terrifying. In other words, it was just another day in America for a black teenager trying to live his life as unobtrusively black as possible.

According to Jaylan’s lawsuit, one officer jammed a knee into his neck, forcing his face into the snow and dirt while his helpless teammates looked on. Another officer tapped his forehead with the barrel of a gun while making clear his indifference to whether he lived or died: “If you keep moving, I’m going to blow your [expletive] head off.”

Even after the bus driver tried to assure the officers that Jaylan hadn’t hijacked the bus and wasn’t holding his teammates hostage and hadn’t shot at anyone on the highway from a speeding car, they were reluctant to let him go.

After all, they had burned through a lot of adrenaline chasing a suspect who crashed his car and ran away on foot. They needed something to show for their fear, even if they’d terrorized the wrong man.

Jaylan sat in the back seat of a squad car, handcuffed, patient and silent. After his alibi and ID had been checked and doublechecked, he was threatened with a bogus charge of resisting arrest. Still, even a concocted charge would be preferable to being shot dead. At least there would be an opportunity to appeal its injustice from someplace other than the silence of the grave if he could get out of that back seat alive.

Eventually, the officers released him without explanation or apology. They refused to give their names or any documentation regarding the grounds for their “stop-and-terrorize” tactics.

The cops wanted there to be as little evidence of the stop as possible. They tried to disappear into the night as anonymously as their predecessors in the Night Riders had in the days following the collapse of Reconstruction.

Imagine a shaken and traumatized Jaylan on the bus ride home trying to explain to his white classmates what had just happened to him. The swim team had just witnessed a slice of law-and-order Americana that will probably never happen to any of them, statistically speaking. How could they imagine being held down at gun point by cops just for stepping off a bus, stretching and taking a selfie — in America?

A year later, Jaylan Butler, now 20, has not forgotten that night at the interstate rest stop and how close he came to death. The ACLU hasn’t forgotten it either; it has filed suit against the police departments and four of the six officers whose names were uncovered thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Laws were broken that night. The officers refused to identify themselves or leave a written account of why they held the young swimmer for as long as they did without explanation.

Consequently, Jaylan is claiming false arrest, excessive detention and excessive use of force. The departments dispute his version, but haven’t offered a counternarrative other than to say the young man’s statements are “without merit” and “inconsistent” with his initial allegations.

They did catch someone later that evening in connection with the shooting incident on the highway, but they refused to release details about that arrest or whether he even looked similar to Jaylan.

You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to agree that the officers who confronted and detained Jaylan Butler on the evening of Feb. 24, 2019, were in the wrong from the moment they refused to identify themselves, explain their actions or apologize when it was clear the student on the bus was not some gun-toting bandit.

It is heartening that the nearly universal reaction to the actions of the officers a year ago is revulsion, regardless of race, gender, age or politics. America has come a long way since the days when cops were given a reflexive benefit of the doubt in shootings. There have been too many recordings of too many traffic stops of unarmed black people that have ended in tragedy. Too many officers claim that he or she pulled the trigger because they feared for their life. It has to stop.

Jaylan isn’t suing for a specific amount of monetary compensation. How do you put a dollar amount on an encounter like that? What the young college sophomore wants more than anything is accountability. He wants the six officers to answer for how they treated him at the rest stop that night and he wants to stop it from happening to any American ever again. It is inevitable that there will be more incidents like it, but at least the officers named in the suit will think twice about doing it again — assuming they’re not fired.