I Smell Pot (Or Maybe Not)
On July 4, 2020, athletes Bianca Williams and Ricardo dos Santos were stopped by police while driving to their West London home with their baby son on the back seat of their car. A total of five officers were involved in the stop, which fortunately for the victims was heavily videoed. At least one dude, in a video uploaded to BitChute, has claimed this was yet another case of crying wolf, ie racism. But was it?
Last month, a disciplinary hearing was held for the five officers concerned, and two of them have now been sacked. Many people appear to take issue with the outcome of that hearing because a crowdfunding website has now received around £120,000 in donations for the two sacked officers. For their part, the two athletes are continuing to cry racism, especially Santos who in a public statement said nothing had changed with the Metropolitan Police since the Stephen Lawrence case, a curious thing to say because Lawrence was murdered before he was born.
Yes, it’s all racism, profiling, yadda, yadda, yadda. He claimed to have been stopped no fewer than nine times in a four week period after buying this particular car in 2018, which does rather put paid to the notion that blacks in this country are a poor, oppressed minority. How many people do you know who drive a Mercedes? As for him being stopped regularly, perhaps he’s just a crap driver.
Whatever the facts of this case, one of the dismissed officers is heard on tape saying he could smell cannabis in the car. Yeah, right. This lie – and that is what it was – is an import from the United States. It is one of the three big lies of especially traffic cops. These lies are:
“I smell pot”
Stop resisting”
“I feared for my life”.
The third of these lies is the most sinister; American police officers are routinely armed and most are very poorly trained so tend to shoot first and ask questions as an afterthought. There is an impressive and sad list of unarmed people, including women, who have been shot dead by the American police, but due to media bias we seldom hear about the white ones.
“Stop resisting” is a claim they make regularly when arresting people who are not resisting; it is used as an excuse to explain away bruises on the victim.
“I smell pot” requires some explaining. In Britain, the police can in effect stop and search anyone they like, in the street or in motor vehicles. They can also arrest people for imaginary crimes and seize property likewise. In the United States, things are very different; they need proper grounds to arrest people, but not to confiscate (steal) their money as detailed in this linked video. (For more horror stories of this nature run the term “civil asset forfeiture” through your search engine with particular reference to traffic stops and airports).
When the police stop a motorist, especially if he or she is young (rather than black) and want to search the vehicle, if the motorist does not consent – something he has no right to do here – the officer will routinely say “I smell pot”. Or maybe not so routinely now.
Kentucky v King (2011) shows how complicated the question of lawful/unlawful searches can be, but in July 2019, in dismissing a case against a motorist, Judge April Newbauer said:
“The time has come to reject the canard of marijuana emanating from nearly every vehicle subject to a traffic stop…So ubiquitous has police testimony about odors from cars become that it should be subject to a heightened level of scrutiny if it is to supply the grounds for a search.”
In other words, the judiciary across The Pond has finally wised up to this kind of police perfidy. Hopefully, the dismissal of the two plods in the Santos case will hammer home that message here as well.