Oklahoma City police officer handcuffs woman for riding a bike and handing him her ID

This is what Officer Snowflake described as “throwing stuff at me. You handed the ID card to me like you wanted to use it as a weapon and throw it at me.”

 A white Oklahoma City woman got a small lesson in what too many black Americans regularly face at the hands of police last week when she was handcuffed and held in a patrol car just for riding her bike to work. After a local resident called 911 to complain that a white man and a white woman were riding bikes looking at driveways, Officer James Herlihy stopped Kelsey Pierce because she was a white woman in a dark shirt with a backpack. Within moments after Herlihy stopped Pierce, he was threatening to put her in handcuffs, which is exactly what he did after she complied with his instructions and showed him her drivers license. (Watch the video below.)

Herlihy told Pierce that he had cuffed her “because you were throwing stuff at me. You handed the ID card to me like you wanted to use it as a weapon and throw it at me.” Those are some fragile damn police officers Oklahoma City has “serving with pride” (as the side of Herlihy’s patrol vehicle reads) if a woman handing over an ID seems like a threatening weapon. Herlihy included that lie in his police report, as well, despite the fact that he was wearing a body camera that proved he was lying and that he searched Pierce’s belongings without asking or receiving permission. And Herlihy was making a safe bet—after Pierce complained, the police department announced that the investigation would happen at the division level rather than going to internal affairs.

For her part, Pierce recognizes that the treatment she received—though unconscionable—is all too common for people of color:

Pierce told us Friday that she has a new appreciation for the kind of fear that black people feel when they are stopped for seemingly small infractions and treated like criminals.

She was aware of the disproportionate stops police have made Oklahoma City’s past, but this event seemed to make it all more real for her.

“This is minute in comparison,” said Pierce. “But, feeling that way every day when you are walking out the door would be enough to make me stay home for the rest of my life.”

As she says, minute in comparison—for Pierce, this was an unexpected, shocking event rather than a fact of daily life. She was handcuffed and put in a police car for no reason, but she wasn’t beaten, and didn’t have serious cause to worry she would be beaten or killed, as police so often do—and get away with doing—to people of color. But every single person in the country should worry about police who are so accustomed to acting with impunity, lying about their abuses, and having their departments basically sign off on those lies, giving them at most a slap on the wrist.