Even though thousands of police officers now wear body cameras to track where they go and who they talk to, people still use their own cameras to get proof. When people think the police are going to treat them badly, they pull out their phones and start to record. Sometimes they do this in a way that makes it clear to the police officer that they’re being filmed. But in the cases we’re about to talk about, a woman secretly filmed a police officer pulling her over for a minor traffic violation.
And the internet is happy about what she gets on video.
Officer Jenkins could have given Chy-Niece Thacker a ticket when he pulled her over for a broken tail light. After all, he broke the rules of the road. Instead, he gave her some good suggestions. And Thacker was happy.
Thacker started to freak out when she saw that a police officer was flashing her car to stop. She started looking around for her license and registration, but she couldn’t find them fast enough to hand them to the police officer when he came to her window.
Then he said something she hadn’t been expecting.
“Don’t be afraid to take anything out. I’m just letting you know that your brake lights don’t work.”
Thacker was on his way to an interview for a job. Getting pulled over made her risk being late. On a day like today, she didn’t need this at all.
But when Officer Jenkins told her what was going on, she didn’t know what to do. Last month, she paid a body shop to fix your brake lights. How could they be tired already?
Thacker told Officer Jenkins that Fir-estone charged her $600 to check the wiring in her car. He was taken aback. So he asked Thacker to open her trunk. He wanted to see for himself what was going on.
Officer Jenkins, who knew a little bit about cars, started to mess with the brake light. He wanted to find out why they weren’t doing their jobs. He thought that he might be able to help this woman and make her safer on the road.
Officer Jenkins wanted to help her, even though another officer might have given her a ticket. He knew that she didn’t mean for the brake light to be out. She was ripped off by Firestone.
Instead, he went out of his way to help Thacker. She felt moved, so she took a picture and put it on the Internet.
She said about Officer Jenkins on Facebook, “He is a blessing.”
As more and more people read it, her story went viral. People were thrilled to hear about the officer’s kindness after it got more than 388,000 likes and 91,000 shares.
She wrote about the event online. After looking in the trunk, he told me to open the hood so he could check the relay box and then asked me to get out of the car so he could check the other one. Officer Jenkins could have easily given me a ticket, but instead he took on the role of a mechanic to make sure I was driving straight.
People sometimes forget that police are also people. When something like this happens, everyone remembers how nice 99.9 percent of them are.