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In mid-August 2018, video of Des Moines police officers stopping and questioning two young African-American men made local news when an Iowa activist organization accused the department of racial profiling: The video, taken from one of the officer's body cameras, shows Des Moines police officers Kevin Thies and Natalie Heinemann stopping Montray Little, 23, and Jared Clinton, 21. Thies can be heard in the footage telling Little and Clinton that he suspects they were smoking marijuana and that he believes Clinton has a gun. After both men were taken out of the car, handcuffed, and questioned, they were released and allowed to go on their way. Clinton's mother accused Des Moines police of baiting her son, while the activist group Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) weighed in and accused Thies of making 282 traffic arrests in 2017, all of which involved African-American suspects. Des Moines station WHO reported that: Those figures caught the attention of human rights activist and attorney Qasim Rashid, who has a large social media following. He initially tweeted the report's inaccurate figures (but in a follow-up tweet he corrected the record): Readers asked us whether all of 282 traffic arrests in Polk County, Iowa, were of African-American suspects, and whether Officer Thies had exclusively arrested black drivers. Neither of those claims is true, although arrest data showed that Thies had an arrest ratio for black vs. white drivers that stood at essentially one-to-one, even though whites make up nearly 70 percent of the city's population and African-Americans only 11 percent, according to 2017 Census data. Rashid corrected the record in a follow-up post after CCI acknowledged they had made an error:
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