Ice cream or traffic ticket, it’s never fun to get pulled over by the police – especially if you’re black.

In the summer of 2016 a viral video made the rounds on Facebook. It was a black woman in her car who had just been pulled over by a white police officer. The video showed the cop surprising her with free ice cream cones. In the car behind her you can see a young boy who sits stiff until the cop delivers his punchline and the woman (his mother?) breaks into a laughter that seems in part a mix of relief. The video, after so many viral videos of black man, women and children being violently attacked, even murdered by police, was hard to watch despite the obviously jovial manner of the white cop. Fusion Net was one of the media outlets that shared the ‘feel-good’ story. Afterwards they posted another video that went deeper into the reasons why videos like this are not enough and in fact might compound the problem. The narrator in this video, Charles Pulliam-Moore breaks it down:

They are about performing what a good cop looks like not actually being a good cop. Good policing is honest policing and that’s what we need more of. Not more staged videos.

Watch Pulliam-Moore’s response here.