As Tyreek Hill, the All-Pro wide receiver of the Miami Dolphins, drove to his game last Sunday, he was stopped by the Miami cops for allegedly speeding. The pigs took Hill out of the car, forced him on the ground and handcuffed him. (A video taken by a bystander shows what happened.)

A couple of his teammates saw this and they got out of their car. When one of them, Calais Campbell, told the cops that he wanted to help out, he was also put in handcuffs. Campbell later said, “I’d seen, I feel like excessive force, so I get out of the car to kind of just try to de-escalate the situation—a bit extreme.”

After the game, Hill, who is Black, said, “I don’t want to bring race into it, but sometimes it gets kind of iffy if you do. What if I wasn’t Tyreek Hill? Lord knows what that guy or those guys would have done.” 

Hill was interviewed on CNN on Monday where he got more into how he felt: “I wasn’t moving fast because you know I got injuries, I got things that I go through. I play a physical sport, I’ve been doing this for a moment now man so I’m dealing with some stuff, so I guess the officers they felt like I wasn’t doing it on their timing. I was doing it but I’m still kind of shell shocked from it.” Later in the interview, he thought about how bad it could have ended: “If I wasn’t Tyreek Hill, worst-case scenario, we would’ve had a different article. Tyreek Hill got shot in front of Hard Rock Stadium, that’s worst-case scenario.”

Hill’s head coach, Mike McDaniel, said that he has never been in the situation that Hill and Campbell were in because while he is biracial, he looks white: “It’s hard not to find myself more upset the more I think about it. The thing that fucks me up, being quite frank, is I don’t know what that feels like.”

To better understand what happened, you have to picture the situation. The pigs pull over a dark-skinned Black man, wearing a tank top with lots of jewelry and driving an expensive sports car. In their eyes, this person is not “legitimate,” so they’re going to fuck him up and put him in his place. This is the point that Hill is making about a “worst-case scenario”—as he and other Black people know, there is a long history in this country of Black people driving in the “wrong” neighborhood being stopped and fucked with, brutalized, even killed.

As revolutionary Bob Avakian says about pigs:

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and order that enforces all this oppression and madness. (BAsics 1:24)

Once again, the pigs send a message to the masses of people that their “job” is to terrorize, brutalize and even murder them. And that they will do this to anybody, especially Black and other oppressed people—including an All-Pro NFL player. This shit will only end when we end this system of capitalism-imperialism that unleashes their pigs upon the people.