NFL players reckon with race, policing after Tyreek Hill detainment

The first week of the season is over and the biggest story in the NFL has nothing to do with what happened on the field and everything to do with the country’s ongoing divisions over race and policing. 

Police officers threw Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill to the ground and handcuffed him during a traffic stop outside Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium on Sunday, hours before his team’s season opener. 

For the NFL, the incident instantly revived a contentious and often angry debate about race and policing in America that first engulfed the league in 2016 after San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem and then again in 2020 after the death of George Floyd.  

“Excessive force on a Black man, that’s not uncommon. It’s a very common thing in America,” said Dolphins safety Jevon Holland, who is Black. “So I think that needs to be addressed at a countrywide level.” 

Holland is one of dozens of NFL players who called for change after Hill’s arrest. 

“We not [gonna] protest or march, we need to do more,” Hill himself wrote in a text message posted on social media. “This s— has to change. It’s not safe for anyone.” 

Body-camera footage of the traffic stop released Monday fueled widespread calls for more police accountability.

One responding officer, Danny Torres, was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. 

But lawyers for the 27-year police veteran said Tuesday they are seeking “immediate reinstatement” after police labor leaders rushed to defend the officers’ actions.

“He was briefly detained for officer safety, after driving in a manner in which he was putting himself and others in great risk of danger,” said Stedman Stahl, president of the local police union. “Upon being stopped, Mr. Hill was not immediately cooperative with the officers on the scene who, pursuant to policy and for their immediate safety, placed Mr. Hill in handcuffs.”

The incident

Just three hours before Sunday’s game, two motorcycle officers saw Hill reach an estimated 60 mph as he approached the stadium in his McLaren sports car. They did not use a radar gun but made a “visual estimation,” according to the citation.

The officers pulled over the NFL star and tapped on his window. Hill lowered his window and handed the officers his license, but repeatedly asked them not to tap on the glass.

“Why you have [the window] up?” one officer asked. “I have to knock to let you know I am here.”

“Give me my ticket, bro, so I can go,” Hill replied. “I am gonna be late. Do what you gotta do.”

Hill then rolled his window back up.

In an interview with CNN on Monday, the wide receiver said he wanted to keep the window up to avoid causing a scene. He reasoned that fans would notice him and start taking pictures if they saw who was behind the wheel.

The traffic stop eventually escalated over the window. Officers told Hill to lower the window while tapping on the glass. He urged them not to give him orders. 

“Keep the window down, or I am going to get you out of the car. As a matter of fact, get out of the car,” one officer said, just before a second officer pulled the door open.

“I’m getting out,” Hill said as a second officer grabbed his arm and neck to force him to the ground.

“When we tell you to do something, you do it. You understand?” one officer said.

“Take me to jail, bro. Do what you gotta do,” Hill said. 

As he was handcuffed, officers asked Hill to sit on a curb. He hesitated, noting that he had a recent knee surgery. One of the officers on the scene grabbed the wide receiver around the chest and forced him to sit down. 

“I’m just being a Black man, that’s it,” Hill told the officers. “I’m just being Black in America in a nice car.”

“We’re dark, too, brother,” one of the officers responded. “We’re people of color, too. Don’t play that like it’s special.”

Dolphins defensive end Calais Campbell witnessed the incident and stopped to try to help his teammate.

“I saw Tyreek getting apprehended. I just wanted to make sure everything was OK, trying to deescalate the situation,” said Campbell, who received the NFL’s Man of the Year honor in 2019. “The officer felt a certain kind of way, put handcuffs on me.”

The officers eventually released Campbell and Hill after issuing citations to the wide receiver for careless driving and failing to wear a seatbelt. He went on to play in Sunday’s game, and celebrated an 80-yard touchdown with a mimed “arrest” by teammate Jaylen Waddle.

The aftermath

“What if I wasn’t Tyreek Hill?” the eight-time Pro Bowler asked later.

“If I wasn’t Tyreek Hill, worst-case scenario, we would’ve had a different article. ‘Tyreek Hill got shot in front of Hard Rock Stadium,’ that’s worst-case scenario,” he told CNN.

The incident has been especially hard to swallow for Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel, who is biracial.

“For me personally, it’s been hard for me not to get more upset the more I think about it,” he told reporters.

The coach’s frustration was echoed by others in his organization — and across the sports landscape. 

“It is both maddening and heartbreaking to watch the very people we trust to protect our community use such unnecessary force and hostility towards these players,” the Dolphins said in a statement. “Yet it is also a reminder that not every situation like this ends in peace, as we are grateful this one did.”

Drew Rosenhaus, Hill’s agent, took to Dan Le Batard’s radio show on Tuesday to ask for the officers’ badges, noting that they should be fired.

“That was horrendous how they treated him,” Rosenhaus said. “They didn’t treat him like a human being.”

Hill’s lawyers have publicly said they’re considering legal action on behalf of their client. 

There were many on social media, though, who defended the officers. Hill was not a victim of systemic racism, they reasoned, but responsible for his own actions.

“White people, if you think [Hill] was targeted cuz he’s black, next time you get pulled over, just roll your window back up in the middle of the stop for a while and see what happens,” one X user wrote. 

Despite its social justice-oriented “Inspire Change” initiative, the NFL has remained mum on the situation.

The league launched the Inspire Change program in 2019 with a focus on criminal justice reform and police-community relations.

“It’s performative. It’s not done out of the goodness of their hearts and morality. It’s done because George Floyd changed the game,” former Commanders executive Rael Enteen said in a secretly recorded video in June. “I mean that the social justice efforts are a performance for the sake of public perception.”

Hill’s history

Sunday’s traffic stop was not Hill’s first brush with the law. The 30-year-old was arrested in 2014 after his then-pregnant girlfriend accused him of assault. He was dismissed from the Oklahoma State football team, sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to undergo an anger management course.

The former Kansas City Chief was also the subject of a child abuse investigation in 2019 after his three-year-old son suffered a broken arm. Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe said that April that his team believed a crime had been committed, but there was not enough evidence to support prosecution.

The Miami-Dade Police Department investigated Hill in 2023 after an employee at the Haulover Marine Center accused him of assault. The man and Hill later reached an unspecified out-of-court settlement — the NFL chose not to suspend the Dolphins wide receiver.

But Sunday’s traffic stop was unrelated to Hill’s history. Some non-Black players said the incident made police brutality hit closer to home. It’s one thing when a stranger suffers an injustice; it’s another when your teammate is the one on the concrete.

“For me, a lot of the instances that I see are of people that I don’t know; it’s happening to those people,” said Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, a Pacific Islander who grew up in Hawaii. “So for it to have happened to somebody that I knew … it was a little emotional.”

Hill noted that he plans to put the traffic stop in the rearview mirror as he looks to turn his bad day into a constructive experience.

“Everybody has bad apples in every situation,” Hill said. “But I want to be able to use this platform to figure out a way to flip this and make it a positive on my end and Miami-Dade and do something positive for the community.”

This article is based in part on wire service reports.