Raleigh Police were looking for suspicious activity. Now someone is dead. | Opinion
Darryl Tyree Williams, known just as “Tyree” to his friends and nicknamed “Boo-Boo” by his family, should still be alive.
He was a 32-year-old who always showed up to work and always had his hair cut, according to his best friend Christopher Strickland. He was his mother’s first born child, and was named after his late father. He attended East Wake High School in Wendell. He should still be alive.
At almost 2 a.m. on Jan. 17, Williams was sitting in a car with another person in the parking lot of Supreme Sweepstakes parlor on Rock Quarry Road in southeast Raleigh, a part of the city with historically Black neighborhoods. In another car, police were patrolling the area because of “a history of repeat calls for service for drugs, weapons, and other criminal violations.”
The police walked toward the car and say they saw an open container of alcohol and marijuana and asked the two people to get out of the car. When searching the duo, police found a dollar bill “containing a white powdery substance consistent with the appearance of cocaine” in Williams’s pocket, and tried to arrest him. Williams resisted.
Police told him they would tase him if he kept resisting. He kept resisting, so they tased him. Williams fell to the ground, but later managed to get away from police and start running. He tripped and fell. Police say Williams kept struggling, so they tased him two more times. The second and third deployments happened in quick succession, with less than a minute between the two.
On the bodycam footage (which has not been made public), Williams can be heard saying “I have heart problems” to the officers in the short interim.
Once he was handcuffed and on his side, the officers determined he was unresponsive. Williams was declared dead at the hospital at 3:01 a.m., just over an hour after police first approached his car.
“What is preventative policing?” EmancipateNC director Dawn Blagrove asked at a Tuesday press conference. “It is a euphemism for stop and search, it is euphemism for harassing Black people, it is euphemism for Jim Crow era policing that is designed to control Black bodies and keep them in their place.”
It does not matter that Williams had a prior criminal record, or that he had marijuana and potentially controlled substances in the car. It does not matter that police later found two guns in the car, one of which had been reported stolen. Police knew none of these things when they approached the car for the first time. They just thought the car, and the people inside of it, looked suspicious.
Doing drugs is against the law. It is also something that lots of people under 40 do. It has been widely believed for years that Black and white people use drugs at similar rates. The difference is that white people are more able to partake in illicit substances without dying at the hands of the police. If police are not routinely patrolling your neighborhood looking for misbehavior, your misbehaviors will not be criminalized.
In New York City, “stop and frisk” policy led to hundreds of thousands of police interactions with people otherwise minding their business. From 2003 to 2013, almost 90% of the people stopped by police were found innocent. From 2003 to 2021, about 90% of the people stopped by police were people of color.
“Proactive policing” should not be the norm in Raleigh, or North Carolina, or anywhere in the country. When a federal judge ruled against New York City’s implementation of “stop and frisk” in 2013, she called it “a form of racial profiling.” While she didn’t rule against it outright, it’s hard to see how this policy could exist anywhere without racial bias warping the outcomes.
“It doesn’t matter what they found in his car,” Blagrove said. “What matters is that on that night, he was bothering no one. He was minding his own business.”
Having drugs in your possession and resisting arrest should not be death sentences. Instead, a Monday night hangout with a friend turned deadly because police were looking for bad actors, instead of just responding when they are needed and wanted.
A son and a best friend is dead, and he shouldn’t be. Darryl Tyree Williams should still be alive.
