DEARBORN, Mich. – A suburban Detroit police officer is catching a lot of heat for for issuing a ticket to a woman who revealed she was HIV positive during a traffic stop. The incident was recorded by the officer’s dash cam.
Shalandra Jones, 43, said she revealed her HIV status to Dearbon police officer David Lacey when he told her and driver Mark Scott that he smelled marijuana in their vehicle.
Lacey told Jones her HIV status “might be something you want to tell a cop if they pull you out of a car.”
The officer can be heard on the dash cam video telling Jones, “You just made me mad” because the officer, who said he smelled marijuana, was rifling through the woman’s purse with his bare hands. He said she should have told him about her status so that he could put gloves on and not catch anything.
Lacey, who initially stopped the car because of a broken brake light and because he was “bored,” wrote the woman a ticket for possession of medical marijuana but the ticket was later thrown out.
Lacey defended his actions, saying “I’ve been going through her purse and she’s got earrings and s— I’m touching, and I don’t want to catch anything.”
Jones is unapologetic about revealing her HIV status, which she isn’t required to do in that situation.
“This will hopefully change how police all over the world treat people with HIV,” she told the New York Daily News.
The situation made news three years later because the city had to pay out $40,000 for the officer’s imprudence and mistreatment of Jones during the stop.
“I was actually shocked,” Jones said. “I would have never expected that kind of behavior from a police officer.”
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