Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said she was doing her part in bringing the country together when she stopped her car to make sure that the professionals at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office were justified after they apparently stopped a black motorist.
“They stopped a brother, so I stopped to see what they were doing,” Waters said in the video.
Waters could be heard saying that she was told by the officers that she was parked illegally and that she could have been issued a ticket. But she said it would be a price that she would gladly pay “as long as I watch them.”
Waters, 81, was praised by supporters for checking on the officers in the wake of George Floyd protests across the U.S.
She made headlines back in 2018 when she said it was important for people to harass and protest members of President Trump’s administration.
“If you see anybody from that [Trump] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” she said.
Sheriff deputies do not answer to the president, but it is clear that Democrats have largely taken either a suspicious approach to police officers in the country or an outright antagonistic one.
The New York Post reported that Waters has recently spoken out against the use of chokeholds by police officers and called to ban them.
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“It needs to be done all over the nation and any iteration of that, whether it is the arm or the knee or a piece of equipment, used to cut off the breathing to interfere with the ability for those who are the victims of these tactics to be killed,” she said in an interview.
When she told the motorist who was filming the interaction that she was keeping an eye on the police officer, the motorist said, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
She was roundly praised by her supporters including MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who wrote, “Lead and serve the people, Maxine Waters!!”