Tyreek Hill’s Week—and Ours

A few days ago I was asked by my therapist to think about what “safety” means to me and to illustrate those feelings in picture form. In a jagged, childlike rendering, I attempted to equate “safety” with “freedom,” crudely drawing my family and myself standing on a rooftop, looking out on a blue expanse of water as bright rays of sunshine illuminated a row of multicolored homes. For me being safe means being able to move according to my will. Not being forced to stay in one place. Not having my body manipulated nor broken, literally and figuratively. Yet safety can often be elusive in this country, especially when one is “living while Black.”

I undertook this exercise two days after the detention of Tyreek Hill, the standout Miami Dolphins wide receiver who was stopped and manhandled while en route to play in a season opener. Since the altercation and the immediate public outcry, a stream of bystander video and police body cam footage has been released, stoking the anger and outrage over his perceived abusive treatment: a Black man being pulled over by Miami-Dade officers and forcibly removed from his sports car.

The encounter, from which Hill escaped relatively unscathed (he received citations for careless driving and failing to wear a seatbelt), didn’t prevent him from ultimately reaching his destination (Hard Rock Stadium) or from scoring a touchdown in a game that saw the Dolphins defeat the visiting Jacksonville Jaguars.

In truth, I stopped following NFL games a while ago. The violence and hype and commercialism of the sport had begun to disgust me. And, until his arrest on Sunday, I had never even heard of Tyreek Hill. Still, the videotaped encounter of a Black man arguably being mistreated at the hands of law enforcement felt all too familiar and deeply painful.

The same day the Miami-Dade Police Department released body cam footage of Hill’s arrest, Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department released its own footage of the death of 26-year-old Justin Robinson, a so-called violence interrupter who had been involved in the city’s Cure the Streets program. The newly public video stoked protests in a smoldering community that, earlier this month, had been incensed by the circumstances surrounding Robinson’s death.

This same week, a federal jury trial commenced in Memphis for three former police officers who have been charged in the January 2023 beating death of 29-year-old skateboarder and FedEx employee Tyre Nichols. (They are charged with depriving Nichols of his constitutional rights and engaging in obstruction.) The Nichols incident occurred during a traffic stop, just as the Hill altercation did on Sunday. And still, tensions are high regarding the July death of Sonya Massey in Springfield, Illinois. She was shot to death in her kitchen after calling 911 for assistance, having feared that a prowler was at her home.

Justin. Sonya. Tyre. And now Tyreek. As a nation, we’ve become numb to the weekly roster of harassed, abused, or dead Black bodies, people whose fates were determined by law enforcement officers—individuals whose nominal job was to ensure the public safety and well-being of members of their community.

Hill’s detention and degradation occurred, I might point out, exactly one month after the 10th anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri—a kind of opening salvo in a decade of inexplicably rough justice, played out in America’s streets and often chronicled by the very cameras worn by the officers themselves.

This week, to me, the idea of “safety” for a man or woman or child of color has felt more elusive than ever. From where I sit, we are still being reminded—as if it were possible to forget—that our country maintains a system that perpetually recalibrates. When there’s progress on one front (e.g., Kamala Harris becoming the first Black and South Asian woman to be made the presidential nominee of a major party), a second front emerges to reinforce a parallel truth: that no matter how high Black Americans rise, they’re still Black. Which means they’re subject to dubious detention; being called “out of their names” (Harris’s name, of course, is not Kamabla); threats of violence; or somehow being “put in their place.”

Until Black and brown bodies in America are free from abuse, harassment, inequitable detention, and humiliation—in a system that resiliently holds what Black studies scholar George Lipsitz has described as “the possessive investment in whiteness”—no one, none of us, no matter our color or creed or standing in society, will ever truly be safe.