Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., interrupted a traffic stop involving a black man during a burglary investigation.
Maxine Waters intervened during a traffic stop involving a Black driver to ensure cops were doing their job properly. #StayOnTheUpnUp pic.twitter.com/XoaqB5mp9f
— Maurice Ash (@TheMauriceAsh) July 20, 2020
Waters was reportedly driving in her home district this weekend when she saw a Los Angeles County Sheriff patrol car conducting a routine traffic stop.
Because the traffic stop involved a black citizen, Waters said she parked her car and walked over to the officers.
“They stopped a brother so I stopped to see what they were doing,” she said in a video of the interaction.
The officer informed Waters that she had parked illegally, but Waters disregarded the warning.
“They said I’m in the wrong place and they’re going to give me a ticket,” she continued. That’s OK, as long as I watch them.”
A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office told the Daily Mail that Waters began berating and “yelling at the deputies.”
She refused to listen to the officers, so they wrote her a ticket. She then refused to sign the citation, but was released with a warning.
Waters has previously accused police officers of enjoying the use of force, using former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin as an example.
Chauvin was the officer filmed restraining George Floyd, whose death while in police custody ostensibly triggered a wave of nationwide race riots in June and has served as a catalyst for the emboldened Black Lives Matter movement.
“I believe, sometimes, some of these officers leave home thinking, ‘I’m going to get me one today.’ And I think this is his ‘one,’” Waters recently told TMZ.
She also has insisted that police brutality and racial injustice are a “tradition” within law enforcement that must be “done away with.”
Waters, who supported impeaching President Donald Trump even before he had committed any of his alleged impeachable offenses, has also accused the president of emboldening officers who believe “they can get away with this kind of treatment.”
“Tradition has not worked for us,” she said last month.
“So what you’re talking about—paying attention to a police chief or your city council members who are saying they just can’t get it done, or your mayors who are elected—these police chiefs don’t want to be accountable to them,” she said. “All of that was tradition, and that’s got to be done away with.”
