McKinney City Council Member La’Shadion Shemwell was stopped for doing 20 MPH over the speed limit. He was given two tickets. One for speeding and one for not updating his address on his driver’s license.
As you probably know, you have to sign the citations and your signature is not an admittance of guilt, but rather it is an acknowledgment that you received them. If you don’t sign you get arrested. Well, Shemwell decided he wouldn’t sign, so he was arrested. Later he blasted the police officer and said that he was racist and had racially profiled him. Then they rolled the videotape that he didn’t know he had been recorded on.
Shemwell then accused Wilkerson of pulling him over for “being black with dreadlocks.”
In the police officer’s body camera, Shemwell repeatedly refuses to sign the ticket and when asked to step out of his vehicle says twice to the officer, “You better call Chief [Greg] Conley.”
After bodycam showed what happened, Shemwell brought forward a measure to censure himself and voted in favor of it, according to the Dallas Morning News
Shemwell said: “If anybody’s going to hold me accountable, I need to hold myself accountable. I didn’t want to put my own council members in a position to pin themselves against me.”
“I did not want to have that conversation about racial profiling on a case that involved me. But I’m not going to shy away from having those conversations.”
Mayor George Fuller said: “We do need to get past it, but you need to get past it from a point of truth. It did happen. We need to deal with it. People have to own it, and then we move forward.”
This is happening more and more. I guess they are going to have to ask the officer if there is a camera trained on them before they start shouting racism.