Missouri Cops Harass Video Vigilante A Third Time
It has been almost three years since a young Saint Louis, Missouri motorist drew national attention by videotaping an out-of-control police officer’s profanity-laced tirade during a traffic stop ( view video). St. George Police Sergeant James Kuehnlein was fired because of the bad publicity generated by the incident captured by the taping system that Brett Darrow, 23, installed in his 1997 Nissan Maxima. On Saturday, St. Louis County Police stopped Darrow once again.
Darrow was with his girlfriend that evening when he came upon a drunk driving (DUI) roadblock. Because he was not in his Maxima, Darrow’s only recording tool was his cell phone which captured 50 seconds worth of the interaction with Officer Kevin Lane before the phone was seized and Darrow ordered out of his car. Darrow complied, locking the door while his girlfriend waited in the passenger seat. Officer Lane then took the keys out of Darrow’s pocket, entered the car without permission, and proceeded to move it down the street.
With the phone turned off and no longer recording, Darrow says Officer Lane began yelling at him in a profanity-laced style “very similar to Sergeant Kuehnlein’s rant from the St. George video.” Sergeant David Stuckmeyer, supervisor for the highway safety unit, intervened. He recognized Darrow.
“I want to leave now,” Darrow told the sergeant. “Do you think I’m drunk? You don’t smell any alcohol do you? I’m not slurring my words. You know I’m not drunk. Why am I not on my way?”
Stuckmeyer did not answer. Darrow complained that his car had been searched and that he was being detained without warrant or probable cause. Stuckmeyer insisted that the roadblocks were set up to check for drunk drivers. In the last fiscal year, however, Stuckmeyer’s unit was responsible for generating 2864 seat belt tickets which has helped to land at least $275,000 in state and federal grants. After finally being told he could leave, Darrow asked for his driver’s license and cell phone.
“Still, as I sit here a few days later, I cannot believe the brazen attitude of all of them towards someone who hasn’t done anything wrong,” Darrow told TheNewspaper. “Apparently they just won’t learn.”
Darrow intends to ask for the dashcam videos from the police cruisers that had their lights flashing on the scene. Listen to the recording of the first fifty seconds of the incident in a 200k MP3 file at the source link below.
Transcript of audio recording
MP3 Audio recording of DUI roadblock (Brett Darrow, 5/29/2010)
[Courtesy: Thenewspaper.com]
More by The Newspaper
Comments
Join the conversation
As someone who used to commute through St. George every day, I can assure you that the what the young man encountered on his first viral vid was nothing short of typical. If you didn't either A: act like a the cop's bitch, or B: know people who could make his life hell. St. George was a tiny (pop ~800) municipality/speedtrap that was the last refuge of cops with very dirty jackets who wanted to work in a white suburb. The force was tiny (largest around 8 total if memory serves) and with the exception of one token female who couldn't pass the STL County muster, was constituted exclusively of POs who had been fired from other munis - and that takes a lot. The former chief was let go from a semi-rural department for an incident with an underage girl and some rape/nookie on duty... (which was only the tip of his career malfeasance iceberg...) The only place in the state that would light me up for not having a front plate on my Pooch. (They'd let me go after finding out my friends. Corrupt as all hell? You betcha...) STL County used to be the 'good guys', but the ongoing paramilitarization of police forces in general, and the totally wrong-headed attempts to quantify policing (aka, Guiliani-esque) has fomented a scenario that is not remotely American. FWIW, IIRC, Lane is in the 3rd, and I used to hang with the guy now running that precinct when he as just a PO in the 4th. I'm saddened and disturbed that he, and the POs under his command have sunk to this level of 'policing'. JSUK- The St. George PD was disbanded well over a year ago. They now subcontract police services to STL County. And though there's not the ever-present car running radar sitting on the shoulder waiting for a petty violation, it still has some elements of the old speedtrap extant.
The issue that a lot of you here are missing is that the cop reached into his car and grabbed his personal property. Then they took his keys and got into his car. I don't give a crap what his attitude was like. What the cop did was illegal plain and simple. You can't just confiscate personal property and search someones car just because you think they are being a douche. And a lot of you sit here and talk about how he's going around baiting cops. How do you think cops arrest and convict many of the "criminals" they get? They bait them into doing something wrong. Why is it that cops are allowed to use this very same tactic to find criminals but us civilians can't use it to find criminal cops?