NFL Players Reckon With Race, Policing After Tyreek Hill Detainment

The first week of the season is over and the biggest story in the NFL has nothing to do with what happened on the field and everything to do with the country’s ongoing divisions over race and policing.

Police officers threw Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill to the ground and handcuffed him during a traffic stop outside Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium on Sunday, hours before his team’s season opener.

For the NFL, the incident instantly revived a contentious and often angry debate about race and policing in America that first engulfed the league in 2016 after San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem and then again in 2020 after the death of George Floyd.

“Excessive force on a Black man, that’s not uncommon. It’s a very common thing in America,” said Dolphins safety Jevon Holland, who is Black. “So I think that needs to be addressed at a countrywide level.”

Holland is one of dozens of NFL players who called for change after Hill’s arrest.

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Just three hours before Sunday’s game, two motorcycle officers saw Hill reach an estimated 60 mph as he approached the stadium in his McLaren sports car. They did not use a radar gun but made a “visual estimation,” according to the citation.

The officers pulled over the NFL star and tapped on his window. Hill lowered his window and handed the officers his license, but repeatedly asked them not to tap on the glass.

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In an interview with CNN on Monday, the wide receiver said he wanted to keep the window up to avoid causing a scene. He reasoned that fans would notice him and start taking pictures if they saw who was behind the wheel.

The traffic stop eventually escalated over the window. Officers told Hill to lower the window while tapping on the glass. He urged them not to give him orders.

“Keep the window down, or I am going to get you out of the car. As a matter of fact, get out of the car,” one officer said, just before a second officer pulled the door open.

“I’m getting out,” Hill said as a second officer grabbed his arm and neck to force him to the ground.

“When we tell you to do something, you do it. You understand?” one officer said.

“Take me to jail, bro. Do what you gotta do,” Hill said.

As he was handcuffed, officers asked Hill to sit on a curb. He hesitated, noting that he had a recent knee surgery. One of the officers on the scene grabbed the wide receiver around the chest and forced him to sit down.

“I’m just being a Black man, that’s it,” Hill told the officers. “I’m just being Black in America in a nice car.”

“We’re dark, too, brother,” one of the officers responded. “We’re people of color, too. Don’t play that like it’s special.”

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The incident has been especially hard to swallow for Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel, who is biracial.

“For me personally, it’s been hard for me not to get more upset the more I think about it,” he told reporters.

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“It is both maddening and heartbreaking to watch the very people we trust to protect our community use such unnecessary force and hostility towards these players,” the Dolphins said in a statement. {snip}

Drew Rosenhaus, Hill’s agent, took to Dan Le Batard’s radio show on Tuesday to ask for the officers’ badges, noting that they should be fired.

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Sunday’s traffic stop was not Hill’s first brush with the law. The 30-year-old was arrested in 2014 after his then-pregnant girlfriend accused him of assault. He was dismissed from the Oklahoma State football team, sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to undergo an anger management course.

The former Kansas City Chief was also the subject of a child abuse investigation in 2019 after his three-year-old son suffered a broken arm. Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe said that April that his team believed a crime had been committed, but there was not enough evidence to support prosecution.

The Miami-Dade Police Department investigated Hill in 2023 after an employee at the Haulover Marine Center accused him of assault. The man and Hill later reached an unspecified out-of-court settlement {snip}

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