There is a lot of disturbing things about this story, but the one that really hits home is once Shai Werts knew the cops were behind him, he called 911 to tell them he was going to pull over but wanted to get to a more well-lit area.
That is the fear any black man has when dealing with the cops and that was just the start of the racial profiling.
Shai Werts was baffled. The star quarterback at Georgia Southern University had just been pulled over for speeding in rural Saluda County, South Carolina. Now, a police officer was insistent that a white substance smeared on his Dodge Charger’s hood was cocaine.
“That’s bird s—. I swear to God,” Werts, 21, told the officer, in an exchange caught on a dash cam. “Can I tell you something? That’s bird s—.”
The Saluda County Sheriff’s officer was incredulous. “It looks nothing like bird poop, man,” he said. “We know what bird poop looks like.”
When his field testing kits came back positive for cocaine during the July 31 traffic stop, he arrested Werts. The drug charges sparked national headlines and left the quarterback briefly suspended and in danger of missing GSU’s season opener later this month against national powerhouse LSU.
Werts later told officers he didn’t feel safe pulling over on a dark, remote road and had called 911 to tell them he was trying to make it to the better-lit town of Saluda before stopping.
“I’m not going to pull over in the dark where no one around can see,” he said on the dash-cam video. “You know what’s been going on in the world. No offense to you, but I just didn’t feel comfortable, officer.”
But Werts was right: That substance wasn’t cocaine. On Thursday night, South Carolina prosecutors told local media that the drug case was being dropped.
Werts was actually suspended from the team, because it is always guilty until proven innocent when you are a young black man.
Flip the page for the dashcam video. These cops have to be idiots to not know bird poop from cocaine. If Werts was white this would have never happened.