The video of the scene was posted on Twitter by Linford Christie, an Olympic gold medalist who coached Williams and dos Santos.
“Racist police aren’t just in America,” Christie tweeted. In a separate post, he accused the police of institutionalized racism.
A female voice can be heard in the video, saying: “Wait, wait, wait, he didn’t do anything.” When she later protests that her son is in the car, the officials ask her to calm down. An officer appears to be trying to pull her out of the car. The couple were handcuffed and held for 45 minutes before being released.
“They consider us guilty until proven innocent,” dos Santos told Sky News on Monday. He added, “The way they came out of the car was like we were the FBI’s top 10.”
In a statement on Monday evening, the police said the officers had seen a vehicle being driven in a manner that “aroused suspicion, braked and accelerated, including driving on the wrong side of the road.” They said the officials indicated that it should stop, but that “it did not and accelerated” before the police caught up with the vehicle.
Williams declined this account. She told the BBC on Monday that the family was driving through “single-width streets”. She said it was not the first time that they had been stopped. “This is not the first, fourth or fifth time – it must be about the tenth,” she said. “It’s getting ridiculous.”
When asked if the race was the reason why they were run over, she said: “100 percent.”
Union leader Keir Starmer told LBC Radio that the video footage makes it difficult to see “the justification” for the handcuffed couple.
“I don’t know what led to the stop,” he said. “But what I do know is that I would feel uncomfortable if I were a manager who is watching this video.”
Some analysts said the incident had received broad attention in part because the recent protests against racism raised awareness of abuse and discrimination.
“As in America, there is a big problem with disproportionate stop-and-search,” said Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University. Official statistics show that blacks in the country are stopped and searched by police almost ten times more often than whites.
He said “it’s not surprising” that Williams was stopped by the police, but “it’s probably more current because of the protests.”
Since the murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis on May 25, people around the world have taken to the streets to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement. In Britain, protests took place in dozens of cities, including Bristol, where locals overturned a statue of a 17th-century slave trader and hurled it into the harbor.
“The protests have shed light on some of the things that are happening, but they are not new topics,” said Andrews. He added: “From a black perspective, there is a lack of trust in the police – it has been around for a long time.”
Helen Harper, the commander of the Met West London office, said in the police statement that the officers “wanted to speak personally to the occupants of the vehicle to discuss what happened and what concerns they had”.
She said a review of the incident, which included examining social media footage and officers’ body-worn cameras, revealed “no problem with misconduct.”
“However, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from every interaction with the public,” said Harper.
“Where we could have interacted better,” she added, “we have to think about what we should have done differently and adopt this learning for the future.”
