Leaked Police Radio Confirms Philandro Castile Stopped for Having ‘Wide Set Nose’

New and troubling information has come out regarding the real reason Philandro Castile was stopped and ultimately killed. On the video that was live streamed in the aftermath of the shooting, Castile’s fiance Diamond Reynolds told the audience that Castile was stopped for a busted tail light. The now identified St. Anthony’s police officer Jeronimo Yanez, lied to Castile. He had an ulterior motive for stopping Philandro’s car. He had a wide nose.

On July 2^nd and 7:30pm, a local convenience store was robbed by two black males with a handgun. They fled the scene and were tracked by police K9 to a parking lot where police believe the men fled in a vehicle. Fast forward four days to Thursday night at 9:00pm. Officer Yanez clearly makes a stop not based on a traffic violation, as he tells Castile. He cites the robbery from the Super USA convenience store to dispatch. He states “I’m going to stop a car…I have reason to pull it over.” Ninety seconds later Philando Castile was dead. The reason he had to pull it over is obvious to all of us, maybe not so much to Ofc. Yanez. The audio that went to the media from an anonymous source has yet to be confirmed as authentic. However, details on the call match those of the vehicle description, license plate, and it contains the screams of the officer calling for help in the aftermath. Bottom line is, its real.

“I’m going to check Ids,” is the first thing Yanez tells dispatch, “I have reason to pull it over. The two occupants look like people that were involved in a robbery.”

Yanez is referring to the robbery from four days prior, which was several blocks away from the location of the stop. The reason he believed that Philandro Castile was involved? “The driver looks more like one of our suspects…Just ’cause of the wide set nose.”

I don’t believe a case of racial stereotyping and profiling has ever been captured so clearly on police audio. Four days after a robbery, no officer is legally justified in conducting a traffic stop, or stop and frisk encounter, based on the wideness of a person’s nose. Even if the stop had been conducted within minutes of the robbery, the wideness of a nose would not meet the criteria of a “reasonable person,” which is the standard police are supposed to be held to.

You have to understand the general rules surrounding things like ‘stop and frisk,’ and the law behind vehicle stops, to truly understand why this was a case of outright racial profiling with no legally justifiable foundation. First off, Ofc. Yanez demonstrated his inexperience by initiating a traffic stop based on loosely fitting criminal circumstances without backup. He had one officer on scene; but for the kind of stop he made, it was woefully insufficient, and in many agencies, a violation of policy. He wasn’t investigating a shoplifting, he was investigating an armed robbery…allegedly. If he truly believed he had his armed subjects, he would have and should have called for what is known as a felony traffic stop. He did not.

A huge factor in all of the officer involved killings is the compromising of officer safety to engage in “cowboy cop” style police work. The concern for officer safety extends to the public, and the methods employed by accredited law enforcement agencies are designed to maximize not only officer, but public safety as well. If an officer has valid reasoning for stopping a vehicle that may potentially have a gun in it, you don’t approach with only one or two cops. You get six or eight before you even initiate your traffic stop. This tells me that Yanez didn’t really believe he had his suspects, or he was dangerously under trained.

While the mainstream media has been referring to the lot of inexperienced cop assailants from both Minnesota and Louisiana, as “veterans”, none of them, including Yanez, had more than four years on the job. These are rookie cops, with rookie level experience, as has become blatantly obvious in light of the new radio information that was leaked to the media. Inexperience is a huge factor in the most recent killings, however, the racial implications, as demonstrated by widespread patterns of black men being killed by police, tells another story.

Sources: Huffington Post, Lillie News, The Last Refuge.

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