A routine police stop quickly turns perilous for a black man in this Emmy®-winning short

‘I was just another black face in the street, and I was almost another dead black male.’

In this short animation from StoryCorps, Alex Landau recounts to his adoptive mother, Patsy Hathaway, the events of the evening of 15 January 2009 when he was pulled over for a simple traffic violation and nearly lost his life to police brutality. Although Hathaway, who is white, raised Landau to believe that his race didn’t matter, they now look back at the incident with a starker view of the realities of racism in the US. Both alarming and alarmingly familiar, Traffic Stop won a News and Documentary Emmy® Award in 2016.