Aahtrell Johnson remembered the police car rolling up, just before he was about to take his shot at the basket under the pine trees. It was 2016, and his neighbor had called 911, complaining that he was getting loud in the street. A white officer named Bobby White had been sent to respond.

As Mr. White, a Florida native with a trimmed goatee, approached Mr. Johnson, who is Black, the officer could see the 17-year-old was only playing basketball with his friend. Rather than issue a ticket, Mr. Johnson recalled, the officer asked if he could join the game. He shot some hoops with the teenagers, and others came out of their homes.

No one noticed that Mr. White’s dashboard camera was running the whole time.

The video — posted online by the Police Department afterward and watched by millions of viewers — was a moment of hope in an age where recordings of police brutality were the ones going viral. Mr. White became a celebrity in Gainesville, Fla., and was nicknamed “Basketball Cop.” Sports stars came to play pickup games with the Gainesville teens. Mr. White founded a nonprofit to ease relations between the police and Black youths and was invited on NBC’s “Nightly News” and ESPN to promote it.

“He didn’t look at us like we were criminals,” Mr. Johnson, now 22, said.

But Chanae Jackson, a real estate agent who was born in Gainesville, had a different understanding of policing in the city. Her son had a troubling encounter with law enforcement in 2018, and she became a vocal critic of the department. This May, someone sent her another video of Mr. White: A cellphone recording of him slamming a Black teenager into the hood of his patrol car.

Source: New York Times

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