Driving While Trans

Yup, it happened again this time to trans man who got assaulted by a police officer.

Prosecutors agree to drop charges against trans man beaten by sheriff’s deputy

Los Angles Times

By Keri Blakinger

August 11, 2023

Prosecutors on Thursday agreed to dismiss their case against a transgender man who was beaten by a sheriff’s deputy outside a Los Angeles-area 7-Eleven, then criminally charged for resisting arrest.

Store surveillance footage obtained by The Times showed Deputy Joseph Benza repeatedly punching Emmett Brock as the Whittier man begged for his life. The arrest stemmed from a traffic stop the deputy said was based on an air freshener he’d spotted hanging from Brock’s rearview mirror and obstructing the view of the road.

Afterward, the department cleared Benza of wrongdoing but Brock lost his teaching job due to the pending charges against him. On Thursday, he said that news of the dismissal came as a relief and that his lawyer still plans to ask a court to declare him factually innocent.

The thin blue line came in to play,

The Sheriff’s Department said this week that, even though a use-of-force review cleared the deputy involved, other aspects of Brock’s allegations are still under investigation.

“The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department takes all use of force incidents seriously,” the department wrote in a statement. “Unfortunately, we cannot comment any further at this time due to the pending litigation in this matter.”

So this whole thing came about because of an air freshener. The courts have ruled many times that minor traffic stops cannot be prolonged, the ABA said that,

In Rodriguez v. United States, No. 13-9972 (2015), the U.S. Supreme Court held that, absent reasonable suspicion, unnecessarily prolonging a traffic stop can constitute an unreasonable seizure. In a 6–3 majority opinion authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court rejected the Eighth Circuit’s holding that a de minimis extension of a traffic stop could be justified under the Fourth Amendment.

I’m not a lawyer but stopping a car for an air freshener and then having it escalate into a charge of resisting arrest seems to violate what courts have ruled.

***

I found this article on Yahoo News which allows comments. Do you want to guess what the main topic of the comments were? About the police officers assaulting Mr. Brock? Nope. About being pulled over for a minor traffic infraction? Nope. It was the fact that he is trans and worked at a school. The other topic was that the officer said he flipped him the bird which Mr. Block denied.

But even if that was true it is not justified for that assault of Mr. Brock.