Columbia City Council candidate accuses SC police dept of racial profiling
Christa Williams, a candidate for city council in Columbia, has filed a lawsuit against the Cayce police department over what she referred to as racial profiling during a routine traffic stop.
In a complaint filed with the Lexington County Magistrate Court, Williams accused Cayce police officer J. Nancarvis of pulling her over because her brake light was out and then subsequently charging her with speeding. Williams maintained that her brake light was out, but that she wasn’t speeding.
“I locked eyes with J. Nancarvis in passing, saw that I was an African American woman, pulled behind me, saw that I had a defective taillight, stopped me and stated that I passed him at 40 mph. ... A broken taillight should be escalated to speeding infractions that I did not commit,” Williams wrote in her complaint filed Oct. 7.
Williams is asking the city of Cayce for $4,160 to cover the cost of her insurance rate increases as a result of the ticket, according to an amended complaint she filed with the city Oct. 13.
In police body camera footage, the officer can be seen approaching Williams’ car. When he informed her of why he pulled her over — going 40 mph in a 25-mph school zone and having a brake light out — Williams denied speeding and accused the officer of racially profiling her.
When asked by a reporter with The State to elaborate on why she believed the officer’s motivation to pull her over was racially motivated, Williams said, “That’s the only way I could rationalize him just blatantly stating that I was [speeding].” She acknowledged that her taillight was out, but said the officer had followed her through two stop signs before pulling her over.
In the bodycam video, Williams told the officer she was “going straight to city hall and I’m going to make a fuss about this because you just profiled me as a Black woman.” Nancarvis denied being able to see her “from that far back” in the video.
“Yes, you did. I looked right at you,” Williams responded.
“I understand that Trump is in office, but you are not going to get away with this,” she said as the officer walked away to run her license.
When Nancarvis returned to his patrol car, he asked another unidentified officer, “Do you want to go talk to her? She is furious, saying I racially profiled her and she’s going to go to city hall after this.”
When Nancarvis returned to the car with a citation, Williams told him that she’d “never been this upset and I worked in law enforcement.”
Ashley Hunter, a spokesperson for Cayce, told The State that the city had reviewed the bodycam footage, radar certification records and other documents and determined that the officer “acted appropriately and in full compliance with departmental policy and South Carolina state law.”
Williams, a candidate for the District 1 council seat in Columbia running against incumbent Tina Herbert in the upcoming city election on Nov. 4, has run for various offices in the past — for Richland County Council and the Richland 1 school board last year.
