Earlier this week, a video showing a Virginia police officer pulling over a black woman at a traffic stop went viral. In the video, the white male officer asked the driver if she knows why she was pulled over, she keeps her eyes averted and says "no" and then quickly rushes to say, "I mean, no sir." When the officer whips out two ice cream cones instead of a ticket—or worse, a gun—the driver's relief is palpable.

What was meant to be a feel-good cop video became something incredibly ill-timed, especially in the wake of the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, who were both killed by police. Castile, a beloved cafeteria supervisor, was killed by a Minnesota Police officer during a routine traffic stop in early July.

"Particularly at a time when so many black people have very complicated feelings about the police, being pulled over by the police is not fun. Being pulled over by the police when you don't know what you've done wrong is not fun. Being pulled over by the police less than a month after the whole world has watched as an innocent black man was fatally shot after a routine traffic stop, it's not fun. It's terrifying," says Fusion reporter Charles Pulliam-Moore in the video, above, which was made in response to the jokey video.

Fusion was one of many media outlets to share the original video on social media. Unsurprisingly, many people were not amused when it went viral.




Ijeoma Oluo, contributor to The Stranger, further breaks down why the video of the Virginia police officers was deeply insensitive in a story for The Establishment.

Watching this video I understood what these “feel-good” video and picture campaigns put on by police departments really are—abuse. They are designed to remind us that they are in charge, and that they are capable of taking our lives in an instant—but if we are good and they are feeling benevolent, they won’t.

These videos, combined with the countless videos of black men and women and children shot dead by cops, serve to remind us that we should both fear and love them if we want to survive. And if we don’t survive, we have nobody to blame but ourselves—see how capable of not killing us they can be?