Police Expert on Traffic Stop of NFL Player Ryan Moats by Dallas Police Officer

Like many folks in the criminal justice and law enforcement education and practitioner arenas, I was distreessed to see the video of NFL player Ryan Moats with Dallas Police officer Robert Powell during a traffic stop. As many people saw on countless youtube and television replays, Mr. Moats was enroute to a hospital in Plano, Texas, to try to see his mother in law before she passed away. Mr. Moats had his hazard lights on and went through a red light garnering the attention of Officer Powell. The Dallas law enforcer pursued Mr. Moats into the hospital emergency room parking lot and detained him for 13 minutes of a heated exchange.

This was an upsetting situation and a blow for law enforcement in the eyes of the community. As a former police chief, former full-time patrol officer, and law enforcement educator/trainer, I view this as contrary to our role in society. I made a video with my views on the situation. That video is featured here below on Blogger, as well as posted on my youtube.com, Facebook.com, Google Video, MySpace.com, Break.com, LiveLeak.com, Seesmic.com, Vimeo.com, Veoh.com, and DailyMotion.com pages. And I see that it has already been picked up by video sites in Asia and elsewhere.

The events as they transpired in the Moats traffic stop were just plain wrong. At the police academy I used to teach in and manage, just North of Orlando in Central Florida, I exhorted the students to remember what it was like before they pinned the badge. I told them to treat people as they would want their mother, father, brother, sister, wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc. to be treated.

The Moats family was in crisis. We are trained to handle people in crisis. As the mature, professional police officer, it is part of the job to deescalate situations and to see the big picture of what is happening. A simplistic view that is black and white (no pun intended here) is not the right path. This was a shade of grey.

To view this as simply go through light and get ticket is not right. Was the Moats family animated? Yes. So was the officer. Any veteran knows that yelling and being disrespectful only breeds more of the same from the motorist or civilian we are interacting with. If someone is agitated, we need to figure out why and calm them down.

If we as a society believe in simple cause an effect in terms of offense and punish, than we should do away with traffic officers and only have robotic, automatic red light cameras everywhere. But clearly we don't all agree that the camera route is the path to take. We need human beings as officers to deal with their fellow humans with compassion. Discretion is a key word here. We legally grant officers that latitude for a reason. It needs to exercised wisely.

Clearly, this was not the case of a lying motorist (which we all run into all to often). A nurse came out twice and a uniformed Plano Police officer came out once pleading for the Dallas Police officer to release Mr. Moats so he could see his mother in law before she passed away. Tragically, that did not happen.

In Florida and other states, you can mail the ticket. I commented on a similiar stoty for the news media a couple years ago involving a Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office Deputy Sheriff in Tampa, Florida, and offered the same solution.

This is also a tragedy for the Powell family (wife and kids too). A young officer has lost his career for what may be an unusual behavior. I have not obviously seen his personnel file, nor am I in the internal affairs/professional standards unit of the Dallas Police Department.

If it is a one-time occurence, and his apology and resignation is genuine, than I hope he learned and gets another position at a good, reputable law enforcement agency. If not, than it is better that he be doing something else. The stakes are too high in law emnforcement. We are not allowed to have a bad day. When we have a bad day, people can die.