Your little bit of sunshine for the day
by digby
A Michigan city will pay a Detroit woman $40,000 in a settlement reached three years after she was ticketed by a police officer for having HIV.
The embarrassing incident in August of 2012 was recorded by the Dearborn officer’s dashboard camera.
Officer David Lacey can be heard telling Shalandra Jones and driver Mark Scott that her HIV status “might be something you want to tell a cop if they pull you out of a car.”
“This will hopefully change how police all over the world treat people with HIV,” the 43-year-old Jones told the Daily News on Tuesday.
In the surveillance footage, Officer Lacey be heard telling Jones “you just made me mad” after finding out about her HIV status. Jones revealed to him she had HIV after he questioned her about medications in her purse.
“I’ve been going through her purse and she’s got earrings and s— I’m touching, and I don’t want to catch anything,” the officer said.
I was actually shocked. I would have never expected that kind of behavior from a police officer.
Officer Lacey smelled marijuana in the car, but seemed to say that if they had revealed her HIV status immediately they would have been completely off the hook.
“Honestly, if it wasn’t for that, I don’t think I would have wrote anybody for anything,” Officer Lacey said. “But that kind of really aggravated me, you know what I mean? You got to tell me right away. … Because at that time, I wasn’t wearing any gloves.”
The officer said he initially pulled over the couple because he noticed the brake light was out and he was “kind of bored,” according to the Detroit Free Press.
Lacey eventually gave the driver tickets for driving without a license and for the broken tail light. Jones was given a ticket for the medical pot, but it was eventually thrown out.
I like that he admitted he was “kind of bored.”
I don’t think it takes much to imagine how often that happens. I’ve been stopped by police a couple of times in the last few years and the excuses were really thin. I don’t know if they were bored or just thought it was a good idea to check out any older car on the road because poor people are criminals. But let’s just say the stop didn’t make much sense, no ticket was issued and the whole thing was a waste of time. I can only imagine how it would have gone sideways if I hadn’t been a middle-aged white woman.
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