Sometimes a good deed is just a good deed. And sometimes Reddit can’t let it be just a good deed. A video capturing Florida sheriffs locked out of their own patrol SUV and a Black bystander helping them open the door in less than ten seconds has the Internet in a mixture of amusement and apprehension. On its own, the video is comical. In the internet comment section, it’s much more.
According to the post, the man used a Slim Jim tool to work the driver’s-side door while deputies stood watching. The man, dressed casually and appearing composed and skilled, opened the lock before most viewers could process the situation. The officers, per commentators, did not appear grateful, amused, or warm. They merely observed.
Internet Reacts To Florida Police Locked Out of Patrol Car Video Involving Black Bystander
The jokes came first. “Thank you sir. Now turn around and put your hands behind your back,” one person wrote. Another clocked the timeline with suspicion: “Man he opened it pretty fast…. Maybe tooo fast,” a user commented.
The surveillance angle landed just as hard: “They definitely noted his plate number for unsolved cases. No good deed goes unpunished right,” one comment read.
But the anxiety bled through just as clearly. “I swear to god I thought he was about to get cuffed near the end of the video lol,” a user wrote – the “lol” doing considerable work. “It felt like a trap. I’m gonna need something signed saying you aren’t gonna arrest me before I start,” one comment read. While another caught something, the rest of the clip couldn’t: “They did not find that as amusing as he did, look at the way they’re looking,” a user commented.
The Florida police patrol car video has become popular because it perfectly illustrates how a normal, helpful act carries different weight depending on who performs it. This isn’t paranoia.
A Stanford Open Policing Project analysis of almost 100 million traffic stops showed that Black drivers are around 20% more likely to be stopped than white drivers relative to their proportion of the residential population, and that Black drivers constitute a smaller proportion of traffic stops during night hours when a driver’s race is less clear, leading to a presumption of racial bias during daytime stops.
Despite everything, the man in the video did everything correctly. Redditors, having seen enough videos where encounters between Black men and police go wrong, couldn’t appreciate the absurdity without waiting for an event that, thankfully, never occurred.
