‘Why Are You Guys Doing This?!’: Michigan White Man May Regret ‘Back to Blue’ Sticker After Cops Mistake Cigarette from Black Friend for Drugs and Violently Arrest Him After Back and Forth, Video Shows
A white man with a Back the Blue sticker on his truck was harassed, threatened and arrested by Michigan cops after the man’s Black friend handed him a cigarette.
That interaction between co-workers prompted an off-duty cop named “Stocker” to contact St. Clair County sheriff’s deputies, informing one that he had just witnessed a Black man handing a bag of white powder to the white man – insinuating he had just witnessed a drug transaction.
When a deputy confronted the man, Jake Kidder, as he is washing his truck, demanding to know what the Black man had handed him, Kidder told him the Black man was his “buddy Ronnie” from work who had handed him a cigarette.
“So you’re telling me, the off-duty, what he saw was bullsh_t?” the deputy asked him.
“Yes, that’s what I’m telling you,” Kidder responded.
But the deputy insisted he had enough probable cause to detain the man and search his vehicle, claiming the off-duty cop saw “plain as day” the Black man handing him a baggie with white powder or pills.
Despite the Back the Blue sticker on the truck, Kidder refused to comply with the deputy’s unlawful orders.
A lengthy back and forth ensues for several minutes with Kidder cursing the officers. Demanding they leave him alone, accuse them of violating his rights.
“Dude, don’t touch me bro. You don’t touch me, man.” When he’s asked to put his hands behind his back, Kidder responds, “For what?” and proceeds to put the car wash brush in its place while continuing in back and forth with officers.
One officer returns to the vehicle and confirms to another officer on the radio that Kidder is noncompliant.
At a later point in the video, Kidder is now in his vehicle. An officer tells him to keep his hands up. “I ain’t playing no more,” the officer says. “I’m not playing either,” says Kidder.
Kidder is eventually yanked out of the vehicle and slammed to the ground by officers.
Online court records from St. Clair County show he was charged with three felony counts of assaulting, battering, resisting, obstructing a police officer as well as one felony count of possession of methamphetamine/ecstasy, all which remain pending.
The videos posted to his channel, three which run more than an hour, show the cops finding no drugs on him or in his truck, expressing frustration at not finding anything.
“I want to find that bag,” the deputy tells another cop while searching the truck. “Somethings in here.”
But after finding nothing, one cop tells Kidder as he is sitting in the back of a patrol car that “you will be stripped down buck naked” at the jail so it would be better to tell them if he had drugs hidden in his orifices.
But Kidder remains defiant against their accusations, insisting he had no drugs on him. And he continues to proclaim his innocence online.
Atlanta Black Star reached out to Kidder for more information but he has not yet responded. Kidder has created a Go Fund Me campaign to raise money for a non-court appointed attorney. He has raised just over $1,000 as of this writing.
Muting Bodycam Videos
The incident took place on Sept. 14, 2024, but Kidder did not mention the arrest on his YouTube channel until March 26, which was when he started posting videos he obtained of his arrest, including body camera and surveillance videos
The videos show the cops telling Kidder that if he had nothing to hide, he would allow them to search his truck.
However, they proved they had much to hide when they turned off the audio on their body cameras to mute their conversation for about 20 minutes at one point during the detainment and again for 10 minutes at another point.
The videos also show them questioning his Black friend who was washing his Cadillac a few stalls away from where Kidder was washing his truck.
The Black man, who told cops his name was Ronnie Heinz, told them he handed Kidder nothing when they told him he was seen handing him “a baggie full of white stuff.”
Heinz even invited the cops to search his Cadillac but they declined.
At another point during the detainment, the deputy sat in his patrol car speaking with this sergeant through a police radio while having Stocker on speaker phone.
“I literally saw him hand it to him,” Stocker assured the deputy and sergeant.
The sergeant told the deputy he had probable cause to search the vehicle based on his “training and experience.”
John H. Bryan, an attorney who runs the YouTube channel The Civil Rights Lawyer, discussed the incident on his channel last week.
“They’re claiming that what this off-duty officer told them that he saw justifies their detaining this guy, searching him and when he dares assert his constitutional rights, what do they do, they arrest him and they completely tear apart his truck searching for what this off-duty cop who’s not even there supposedly saw.”
Bryan also accuses the cops of violating Kidder’s Fourth Amendment rights by searching him and his truck based on what the off-duty claimed he saw.
“The Fourth Amendment is clearly implicated at this time, any reasonable person under the circumstances would feel like they are not free to leave now,” Bryan explained. “For that to be justified under the Fourth Amendment, it would have to satisfy the test for what’s called a Terry stop or an investigative detention basically. Sort of like a traffic stop, but it’s not because you’re at a car wash, you’re on foot.”
The West Virginia attorney went on to explain how the landmark 1968 Supreme Court opinion in Terry v. Ohio set guardrails around police conduct in investigative stops.
“For a Terry stop to be lawful, a police officer needs reasonable suspicion. In other words, the officer needs specific, objective facts, not just a hunch indicating that there has been a crime or some sort of violation of law. The officer performing this stop must be able to clearly explain observable evidence that justifies the stop. No hunches are allowed. Vague feelings or unsupported intuition, i.e., looks suspicious is not allowed,” Bryan said
“Here what information does the officer have? All he knows is this an off-duty officer relayed to him that he saw something being exchanged between a Black guy in a Cadillac and this guy that he’s talking to. He’s implying that this could be drugs.
“How does he know it’s drugs? Well, I guess he has a hunch or he thinks it looks suspicious,” the attorney concluded.
And that is exactly why, based on the video evidence that has been published online, the cops violated Kidder’s constitutional rights.
Atlanta Black Star will update this story if we hear back from Kidder.