An Alabama man taped an encounter of himself brilliantly engaging with two officers who stopped him merely for jogging around his neighborhood.
The Free Thought Project reports that Corey Dickerson was out of breath and taking a breather after a rigorous jog one evening, when an officer stopped his patrol car to inquire what he was up to.
During the encounter, Dickerson asks if he has done anything wrong and then calmly declines to give his name or state his business.
“You look like you been running,” the officer says. Once Dickerson confirms that’s true, he then asks, “Where you been running from?”
Dickerson says he’s headed “nowhere in particular.”
The jogger then tells the officer he intends to remain at the front of the patrol car — in full view of the dashboard camera — while he records the encounter on a cellphone that automatically uploads video.
This moment is crucial, because it lets the officer know that, even if the phone is confiscated, the footage will still exist elsewhere.
“Look, my camera does the same thing, and you can tell them why I stopped you,” the officer responds. “It is 12:30 in the morning, I’ve had a lot of burglaries and thefts. You can get this on camera, so now I’m just asking you for your ID.”
[youtubevid video=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUeV0fCuml4″ id=”fUeV0fCuml4″ w=”640″ h=”360″]
While Alabama is a “stop and identify” state, Dickerson is familiar with the law and repeatedly asks the officer if he is suspected of a crime and, if so, which crime exactly.
A second officer who previously saw Dickerson jogging arrives on the scene and tries to reason with him that police must investigate any suspicious activity they spot while on patrol.
“I’m not a lawyer, don’t even pretend to be one, but I know that in order to detain me, you’ve got to have some type of reasonable suspicion that I’ve committed some type of crime,” Dickerson pushes back. “I’m minding my own business out here, I’m literally jogging — exercising.”
When the second officer points out the first officer was reasonable to be suspicious of someone running in a neighborhood, Dickerson corrects him by clarifying the first officer never actually saw him run at all.
“He literally seen me just standing right here,” Dickerson says. “I was literally bent over right here, catching my breath.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I don’t trust police just because I got my hair pulled out, I was choked, tased, maced, beaten bloody — you hear me? beaten bloody — by four cops while I was in handcuffs,” Dickerson shares as the officers try to assure him they have the best of intentions. “One bad apples spoils the whole bunch for me.”
The video ends as Dickerson calls his sister.
He was not arrested.
You can check out the full video above.
