A Texas man recorded a now-viral video showing his wife, who is Black, being stopped and ticketed by police for walking on the wrong side of the road. Now, the couple is demanding an apology, alleging police turned a minor incident into an “excessive show of power.”
Brad Townes filmed the moments two police officers stopped his wife Akia as the pair were walking around their neighborhood in Groves, Texas, looking for their lost dog.
“Can’t walk while Black in Groves,” Townes, who is white, is heard stating repeatedly on the video.
A female police officer is seen approaching Townes and showing him the traffic law on her cellphone.
“She was not walking on this side of the road,” the officer states.
“What does it matter?” Townes responded.
“It’s a traffic violation,” the officer insists.
“No it’s not,” Townes countered.
During the stop, the couple learned that Akia was being detained for the traffic violation.
“Oh she’s detained for being Black and walking in Groves,” Townes says. “I don’t care, give her a ticket, it ain’t gonna stick. Walking while Black in Groves.”
“This is ridiculous,” he states at a later point in the video.
Akia Townes told KFDM the April 2 traffic stop happened just two doors down from her and her husband’s home.
“Two cops stopped me. They walked out with their hands on their guns, and then they asked me to see my ID,” Townes recounted.
Texas Transportation Code dictates that pedestrians must walk on the left side of the road facing oncoming traffic if they’re on a road with no sidewalk. The video shows Akia on the right side of the road.
As the couple protested the stop, the two responding officers called for backup. The Groves Police Department said four officers ended up responding, two of whom were in field-training and shadowing their training officers.
Townes said she was ticketed for the traffic violation, but she and her husband have hired an attorney to fight the citation.
“It’s just very an excessive force of power for me just trying to go and find my dog,” Akia Townes said. “You could have easily said, ‘Hey, ma’am,’ and I could have explained to you what I was trying to do, but then you threatened my husband and threatened me to go to jail.”
“I feel like they looked and saw an easy target, and nobody was going to come and defend and nobody was going to come help,” Akia’s husband Brad added.
The Groves Police Department released figures on citations for the same violation which revealed that since Jan 1. 2023, eight people have faced that specific infraction, including five white people, two Asian individuals, and one Black person.
“We want to be able to make a difference in making our community safer,” Groves City Marshal Chris Robin said in response to the viral incident, adding that the police department doesn’t tolerate racism. “We’ve seen so many different minor ordinance violations turn into something tragic, and we don’t want that to occur.”
The couple’s attorney, Langston Adams, believes the stop was racially motivated.
“It’s not a question of whether she was breaking the law. We believe it’s selective enforcement and racial profiling,” Adams said. “Why didn’t the husband get a ticket? He was also walking on the wrong side of the road and he’s white. I believe they used her walking on the wrong side of the road as a pretext to stop her.”
