Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) was driving around her Los Angeles district when she noticed police detaining a black man – so she stopped to keep them in check, according to a report.
“They stopped a brother, so I stopped to see what they were doing,” Waters, 81, tells a person who recorded the Friday incident on South Vermont Avenue, TMZ reported.
“They said I’m in the wrong place and that they’re going to give me a ticket,” she adds about the LA County sheriff’s deputies. “That’s OK as long as I watch them.”
A woman is then heard saying: “Gotta do what you gotta do! Make sure!”
“Bye, Maxine!” a man then shouts.
The brief confrontation comes amid widespread demonstrations that have roiled the country in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death while in police custody in Minneapolis.
Waters, who founded the Black Women’s Forum, has fought to ban the use of chokeholds by law enforcement.
“It needs to be done all over the nation and any iteration of that, whether it is the arm or the knee or a piece of equipment, used to cut off the breathing to interfere with the ability for those who are the victims of these tactics to be killed,” she said recently, according to Spectrum News 1.
*story by The New York Post