*Sen. Tim Scott, an African American, Republican from South Carolina, took the Senate floor on Wednesday to deliver a speech about his own experiences with the police, even inside of the Capitol building.
Scott said just last year he was stopped by a Capitol Police officer who didn’t recognize him as a senator, even though he was wearing his member’s pin.
“The pin, I know. You, I don’t,” Scott recalled the officer saying with “a little attitude.” Scott said the officer believed he was impersonating a senator.
Scott said he received a call later that evening from a Capitol Police supervisor apologizing for the officer’s behavior. It was the third such call he has received from either the chief of the Capitol Police or a supervisor since joining the Senate in 2013, he said.
Over the span of one year as an elected official, Scott says he was stopped seven times by law enforcement. And while in some of those instances he was speeding, Scott said the “vast majority” of those encounters were the result of “nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial.”
Scott also shared the story of a former staffer of his who drove a Chrysler 300, “a nice car without any question, but not a Ferrari.” His staffer ended up selling the car out of frustration after being pulled over too often in Washington, D.C., “for absolutely no reason other than for driving a nice car.”
He shared the story of his brother, a command sergeant major in the U.S. Army, who was stopped by an officer suspicious that the car he was driving was stolen because it was a Volvo.
“I have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness and the humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself,” Scott said.
These types of encounters, Scott said, should not lead anyone to feel it necessary to break the law. Nor should it be used to diminish the respect the public should rightly feel for law enforcement officers “who go beyond the call of duty.” But Scott pleaded in his remarks that the issues African-Americans face in dealing with law enforcement not be ignored.
“I simply ask you this: Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist,” he said. “To ignore their struggles, our struggles, does not make them disappear. It will simply leave you blind and the American family very vulnerable.”
Watch Sen. Tim Scott’s speech below in its entirety:
Scott, whose political career began 21 years ago on Charleston’s city council, joined Congress in 2010 by defeating one of former senator Strom Thurmond’s sons. He served just one term before being elevated to the Senate by Gov. Nikki Haley, R, the state’s first female and non-white governor.
Just last September, Scott defended the term “All Lives Matter,” which the Black Lives Matter movement views as yet another way to diminish the threats that black people live with in America, telling CNN that “if that is somehow offensive to someone, that’s their issue, not mine.”
Scott’s Wednesday speech was the second of three he is giving in response to last week’s shootings. “The good Lord has given me a soapbox, and I’m going to use this soapbox to talk about what needs to be spoken about,” he told his hometown newspaper this week.
On Tuesday, Scott praised the sacrifices of police officers.
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