A Black motorist has decided to sue Michigan State Police after troopers subjected him to a humiliating traffic stop. The incident was captured by police-worn body cameras. Dakarai Larriett says he was arrested on the false assertion that he was intoxicated when he was pulled over in Benton Harbor earlier this year.
Larriett, who filed his lawsuit on Wednesday, claims he was racially profiled when troopers pulled him over in his Cadillac SUV, made fun of his name, and subjected him to homophobic remarks. In the clip, Trooper George Kanyuh insists that Larriett was under the influence when they stopped him.
“I don’t know what he’s on,” Kanyuh can be heard saying to his partner Matthew Okaiye in the video. “I’m going to assume it’s weed and alcohol.” Though there was no apparent proof that Larriett was under the influence, the troopers still handcuffed him and transported him to a hospital to be tested for alcohol and drugs.
He was then taken to jail, despite his alcohol test being negative. In a statement to the Metro Times, Larriett explained how things somehow went from bad to worse. Police did a scan of his stomach, he said, before they accused him of “trying to smuggle drugs into the jail by way of ingestion of a bag of drugs.”
Larriett told the publication he also suffered “an extremely humiliating moment...where I was forced to defecate publicly while Trooper Kanyuh yelled at me not to flush.”
Larriett was initially charged with operating under the influence of a controlled substance. However, according to a federal complaint filed by his attorney Shawndrica N. Simmons, prosecutors immediately dismissed the case “due to lack of evidence and the unlawful nature of the stop and arrest.”
Simmons also said that the “actions of the Michigan State Police officers were part of a pattern and practice of racially discriminatory policing.”
After the incident, Larriett located a now deleted X account, @GKanyuh, that he believes was operated by Kanyuh. It allegedly contained racist, homophobic, and misogynistic tweets.