As commentators from various genres weigh in on the situation that took place on Sunday with Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill, Bomani Jones took to his podcast to offer his thoughts. While not necessarily jumping in the pool to pile on either the police or Hill, Jones focused more on what the reaction was from the media on the story. Jones believes from what he saw, sports media was more interested in how this affected the Dolphins and less on the way Hill was treated by law enforcement or the larger issue of excessive force by police against minorities.
“Hey, do you remember when we used to care about the police beating people up and killing them?” Jones asked on The Right Time with Bomani Jones. “You remember that? Because it used to be like a really big thing. But it dawned on me. August 9th of this year was the 10th anniversary of Mike Brown being killed in Ferguson, Missouri…But from the way that we are acting about [the situation with Tyreek Hill], because I find that by and large, the way that I’ve seen the commentary about this is sports media had a lot more to do with football than anything else.”
Jones also talked about how Hill’s teammates reacted to the situation including ones who went to the scene to try and check on Hill and see if they could deescalate the situation.
“Calais Campbell, by my estimation, risked his life to go inquire what was going on there. And you know why I say he risked his life to go inquire what was going on there? Because that dude is six foot eight and three hundred and something pounds. And I my first thought would be, ‘they are going to lay his big ass down’, like that was my number one thought there…I was scared to death in hearing that, that could easily wind up happening to him because those are what the stakes are.”
Jones continued, “We had all this talk for all this time about police violence generally and specifically against Black people. But we had all this talk about this. It is my understanding that the numbers around those things are roughly the same.
“So, I get back to the question, do we still care about the police roughing people up? And if we do still care about police roughing people up, like what are we supposed to do at this point? Because what seemed to happen was people just kind of ran out of energy. A lot of people ran out of energy and this is a big one that you can’t lose sight of…But this made me stop and think back to 10 years ago, what a major thing something like this would have been and how the sports media at that time was very well equipped to have people get on television and get on everything else and talk about what went on.
“And we were talking about it in these macro levels. Now, I think a few things happened. One, I think especially after COVID, people’s capacity for outrage and their energy for it is a lot lower and they don’t really have it in them to dial it up and be charged up, at least not about things that matter…I don’t think people have the energy really to get invested in the things that really matter anymore. But it was hard to ignore the difference in the way that we would treat such a thing.”
Jones thinks the fact that Hill was not arrested and did not miss any playing time factored into the way people chose to react to the story. He believes sports media would have been much more vocal had the story been different and Hill would have had to miss the game.
“This is a Hall of Fame football player being stopped on the way to a game. Maybe it’d be treated differently, and we’d look at it differently, if it had been something that stopped him from actually being able to compete. Maybe we’d go about it a little bit different if the person getting hemmed up by the cops was a little bit more of a sympathetic figure. I think that all those things maybe go into it. But I think it is hard to look at this and not stop and look back and be like, we kind of gave up.”
