A Massachusetts officer is in hot water after the release of a dashcam video that caught him telling a motorist “I’ll put a hole right in your head” during a Sunday night stop.
The recording posted on YouTube begins after the 25-year old driver, who we only know as “Michael” or “Mike”, purportedly drove the opposite way on a rotary.
Moments later, we see a truck pulling next to him and the off-duty, Medford, Massachusetts detective, who has since been identified as Stephen Lebert, jumping out of the car wearing a white tank-top and camouflage shorts.
The officer approaches the car in an aggressive way and asks the driver to open the window, but the driver puts the vehicle in reverse. It’s not clear from the video if the cop showed his badge before the driver reversed or after.
Once the driver realizes that he’s dealing with an off-duty cop, he stops and pulls the handbrake, and that’s when things get iffy.
“I’ll put a hole right through your f**king head,” Lebert can be heard yelling at least twice to the driver. “I didn’t know you were a cop”, says Mike who pulls over to the side of the road.
“You know I’m a cop. I’m a f**king Medford detective and you went through that f**king rotary head on,” says the cop. “I didn’t see a sign, I’m sorry I didn’t see that sign” replies the driver.
“You’re a f**king a**hole. Never mind; you’re lucky I’m a cop because I’d be beating the f***ing p*** out of you right now,” says Lebert.
The driver repeatedly informed Lebert that he had his camera on, while he did the same when a police cruiser arrived at the scene.
It’s worth noting that, according to Boston.com, “Massachusetts is a ‘two-party consent’ state, which means it’s illegal to record audio without the knowledge and permission of the person being recorded—but you don’t have to tell a cop you’re recording them” as a court ruled that “there is a First Amendment right to record police carrying out their duties in public” just as long as you do it in a way that you don’t get in the way of their work.
“When an officer stops a vehicle, he’s carrying out his duties in a public place,” Sarah Wunsch, Deputy Legal Director of American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLUM), told Boston.com. “If the recording device was in plain sight, he would not have been guilty of violating the statute,” she said. “A dash cam is obvious enough to the police. It doesn’t matter if the officer doesn’t notice it: It’s in plain sight, it’s not hidden, it’s not secretly recording. The First Amendment protects this activity.”
In addition, it turns out that LeBert had no right to say that he would seize the driver’s camera in this case.
Back to our story, the driver then told the officer, who arrived at the scene, that initially, he didn’t know who Lebert was, with the cop replying that he’s “one of our detectives”.
“Yeah, he told me that,” said the driver. “But, I didn’t know that, and he was super aggressive at me. He was yelling. And he jumped out of his truck, and he yells that he’s gonna blow my brains out. And so I got scared and I threw it into reverse. I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Like I don’t know this guy. He’s got tattoos, he’s got wifebeaters. Where I’m from—I grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts—it’s a rough area. When someone says they got a gun, they usually got a gun. So I’m like, ‘Oh, my god. I’ve gotta get the hell outta here.’”
Mike shared his account of the incident in the video description:
“Driving home today I got lost and made a wrong turn. In an unfamiliar area I drove slowly but made the mistake of not seeing a poorly marked one way. I stopped midway through entering it when I realized I screwed up and fortunately there were no close calls or potential accidents. Only a single oncoming car (not the medford cop/detective in the video, he was on the other side) that had fully stopped before the road seeing my stupid mistake.
After I stopped and realized it was too late I just continued out of the way and back onto the correct road in front of me. This man starts tailgating me and puts his high beams on in his Red Chevy Silverado pick up truck. He then yells how I’m an asshole and that he is going to hurt me, and well the rest is in the video.
The date is incorrect as my dashcam apparently was set wrong. I very rarely ever need to pull videos off of it over the period of time I’ve owned it and just didn’t notice the date mistake. The time however is right.I also never gave my address to him, he found it by running my plates/license so him saying I’m not registered is false. I have had that info updated since I moved.”
Eventually, the cops let the driver go, but the story didn’t end there, as the detective in question was placed on administrative leave upon arriving at work the next day, Monday, July 27, while the incident is being investigated.
“It’s very troubling, very concerning,” Medford Police Chief Leo Sacco told FOX25. “It’s not the proper behavior, but we only know about it when people tell us. And unfortunately, we had to get up this morning and see it on a YouTube video.”
It turns out that, this is not the first time that LeBert has caused a scene on camera, as a 2012 cell-phone video shows him confronting the man who tried to film him, licking his finger, and wiping the camera lens, before asking him “what’s your drug of choice?”. Later on in the same video, LeBert is heard saying, “What they should do is just take him up on the railroad tracks and tell him to lay down.”
The Medford cop reportedly received “some sensitivity training for the 2012 incident”, according to Sacco.