The Social Justice Warriors briefly had a new hero in the battle to prove that all cops are racists this summer and it came from the hotbed of racial intolerance known as the Connecticut suburbs. A professor at a community college in Hartford was pulled over on a rather basic traffic violation and was accosted by the police officer in a way which clearly demonstrated racial profiling. Or so she claimed.
According to Fox CT, Minati Roychoudhuri, 32, was driving on a highway on May 9 when she was pulled over in the town of Wethersfield. She was cited for failure to drive in the established lane. A month later, Roychoudhuri sent a letter to the Commissioner of Public Safety claiming that the officer had racially profiled her.
“The policeman asked me if I could speak English and if I knew why he had stopped me. I said, “yes” to speaking English and “no” to why he had stopped me,” she wrote in the letter. “The officer did not give me any reason as to why had stopped me. His asking if I could speak English shows that he had racially profiled me and was not able to give me a concrete reason for stopping me.”
That clearly sounds like some inappropriate questioning on the part of the officer and a lack of sensitivity if nothing else. Unfortunately for Ms. Roychoudhuri, the cop had a dashcam recorder running and audio of the entire incident was picked up. The actual conversation she had with the officer was, to say the least, somewhat different than the way she described it.
In the recording, the officer asks if Roychoudhuri knows why she is being stopped. When she says no, the officer is heard saying, “Okay. There’s that big gore area with white lines painted across it and you cut in front of it, in front of me, thinking it’s a lane or something. You have to wait until it’s a dotted white line.”
The investigation concluded that the officer never asked Roychoudhuri if she spoke English and that he clearly explained to Roychoudhuri why she was pulled over.
Oops. Looks like somebody was telling tall tales out of school and that’s a Bozo no-no, kids. It’s also a crime to file a false report with the police and she was subsequently arrested with bond set at $1,000 and an invitation to visit with a judge on August 14th. But there’s still some confusion as to precisely what the woman’s association with the college is. While making the rounds with the press and sensationalizing her story, she claimed to be a professor at Capital Community College who “teaches about diversity and the negative impact of racial profiling.” But when reached for comment, the school told a different story.
Capital Community College was not prepared to make any comments on the allegations, but said Roychoudhuri is an English professor and is on sabbatical.
English professor sounds a bit far afield from a diversity specialist (I assume that’s a thing now…) but who knows these days? Perhaps she was. And “sabbatical” can mean a lot of things in the education community, ranging from having been suspended for cause to taking time off to write a book. But either way, one thing is clear. Ms. Roychoudhuri was looking for a story on racial profiling to up her street credibility and, failing to find one, decided to create one starring herself. She apparently doesn’t spend much time watching the news, though, or she’d have known that cops are recording events on their rounds almost everywhere these days, often to protect themselves from just such specious accusations. So I guess these cameras are a pretty good idea after all.
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