https://youtube.com/watch?v=3xCsCnqdxMc
Who initiated the traffic stop confrontation? I'm not 100% sure.
If it is a game to cause the cop to escalate, it is pretty subtle. The stop itself seems justified but it gets fuzzier after that.
At 1:20 you can see a very brief movement by the driver towards the handle area on the inside of the door where lock switches often are. The camera's angle wasn't quite good enough to see if this causes the lock nub to go down when he does that.
Now it may be coincidence but immediately after, and almost simultaneously with the officer reaching for the lock nub the driver just happens to lay his arm directly across the nub as he puts the rest of his arm out the window. At which point the driver who has just covered the nub begins to tell the officer he needs to grab the nub he has just covered to unlock the door.
If he's claiming the punch is around 1:30 that could easily be caused by the cop pulling the arm towards himself.
Something about his reaction being to reach for the lock switch area inside and then put his arm OUT the window and covering the lock (complicating his removal from the vehicle) rather than, when his hand was by the door handle inside, just pulling the handle to pop the door and starting to exit as instructed just feels like a few too many coincidences...that said if it's a game being run on the cop, the cop fell for it and it's a reasonably skillfully executed one, because the result doesn't look good for the cop.
There's definitely resisting by the driver occurring after (that dashcam of the officer trying to handcuff him outside of the car clearly shows passive resistance, and is also funny), but the escalating incident doesn't look compelling enough to justify the reaction by the cop and the result is a video that probably won't look good to a jury (if it ever got there in a civil suit).
