Watch this video and ask yourself when you realize Florida State Attorney Aramis Ayala knows this stop is...suspect.
Video of two Orlando officers pulling over Ayala -- the only black state attorney ever elected in Florida -- was released last month and has now begun to bounce around the internet. The interaction between Ayala and one of the officers gets a bit awkward after he asks what agency she's with and she replies that she's the state attorney.
"Thank you, your tag didn't come back," the officer says by way of explanation, meaning that they scanned her license plate and didn't get a match to a registered vehicle. "I've never seen that before."
Ayala asks why her tag was run, and the officer says they do it all the time to check for stolen vehicles and such.
And then he says, "also the windows are really dark," the officer says, at which point viewers can see Ayala look straight ahead and let a smile spread across her face that says something along the lines of, "...right."
"I don't have a tint measure, but that's another reason for the stop," he says. Ayala then asks for the names of the officers.
The state attorney has since said that the tint "was in no way a violation of Florida law." She did call the stop "lawful," though she also wants to sit down with the chief of Orlando police to talk about what happened.
The police, for their part, defended their practices in a statement.
"The Orlando Police Department allows the running of tags for official business only, and this is done routinely on patrol," department officials wrote in the statement. "As you can see in the video, the window tint was dark, and officers would not have been able to tell who, or how many people, were in the vehicle. No complaint has been filed in reference to this traffic stop."
Topics Politics
