A Texas university dean who said police stopped her for ‘walking while black’ drew outrage after the local police chief rebutted her claims.

Dorothy Bland, dean of the journalism school at the University of North Texas, wrote a column in the Dallas Morning News stating that she was stopped by police while walking in her neighborhood.

She claimed that she was stopped because of “walking while black.”

Bland wrote in her column:

“Flashing lights and sirens from a police vehicle interrupted a routine Saturday morning walk in my golf-course community in Corinth. Like most African-Americans, I am familiar with the phrase ‘driving while black,’ but was I really being stopped for walking on the street in my own neighborhood?”

Bland’s column was published four days after the incident, and it made many very bold claims about it:

“I had no interest in my life’s story playing out like Trayvon Martin’s death. I stopped and asked the two officers if there was a problem; I don’t remember getting a decent answer before one of the officers asked me where I lived and for identification,” Bland alleged. “I guess I was simply a brown face in an affluent neighborhood.”

Then the police chief decided to fight back after the professor ruin their reputation in her column.

According to BuzzFeed reports, the Corinth Police Department wrote a response to Bland, which was also published in the Dallas News. Corinth Police Chief Debra Walthall said the encounter was not about race, but about Bland’s safety.

In response, the police chief refuted her claim and released the dashcam footage of the incident.

Watch it here: The Dallas Morning News/Youtube

Walthall wrote:

“They immediately advised … that it was safer for her to walk against traffic so she could see the cars and jump out of the way if necessary. Impeding traffic is a Class C misdemeanor, and it is our policy to ask for identification from people we encounter for this type of violation.”

“I am surprised by her comments as this was not a confrontational encounter but a display of professionalism and genuine concern for her safety,” she added.

Read more of this story from Taphaps:

The dashcam footage showed Bland walking in the street before a police sergeant and an officer trainee stopped her. Her back was to the officers, who were in their patrol car, and the woman had a hood covering her head. From behind, you could only see her grey sweatshirt and black pants as her entire body was covered by clothing on the rainy Saturday morning.

When the cops got out of the car and approached Bland, they immediately advised her that her safety was at risk and told her that she needed to walk on the other side of the street so that she could see oncoming traffic. The cops mentioned a truck, saying she did not see it and she impeded traffic, and also explained that they had followed her for some time without her taking notice.

“We didn’t want you to get hit,” one of the concerned officers told Bland. He then asked her for identification, which she did not have on her. So, the officer took her name and date of birth and radioed it into the station. As the officer obtained his documentation, Bland also began to take note of the incident, snapping photos of the officers and their vehicle.

Before she was released, Bland told the cops that she can’t believe she was stopped for walking and reminding the officers that she is a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen. She then left without further incident. But, her scathing column told a very different story than the actual video of the incident. Luckily, Chief Walthall wasn’t about to let the reputation of her officers be ruined with false allegations.

“They immediately advised … that it was safer for her to walk against traffic so she could see the cars and jump out of the way if necessary,” Walthall wrote in response to Bland’s column. “Impeding traffic is a Class C misdemeanor, and it is our policy to ask for identification from people we encounter for this type (of) violation,” she explained. “I am surprised by her comments as this was not a confrontational encounter but a display of professionalism and genuine concern for her safety.”

After the release of the dashcam footage, which contained no evidence to support Bland’s claims and refuted the accusation, the professor told NBC News that she had nothing more to add and that she was ready to move on and focus on her job. But, that’s simply not good enough. Something more does need to be said.

Racism has left an ugly mark on our nation’s history; however, we’ve come a very long way. Is the world perfect? Sadly, it’s not. But, we don’t end racism by jumping to false conclusions and making everything about race. Not everything that happens to a person is based on the color of their skin. In reality, very little actually is. Racism isn’t the first conclusion we should draw when determining why something occurred.

In this case, anyone behind the woman, including the officers, couldn’t determine her race. Her clothes, including her hood, covered her skin completely. Instead of evaluating the incident rationally and asking questions to clarify what was happening, an emotional reaction was had and her conclusion was inaccurate. This is all too often the case when it comes to allegations of racism — it’s an assumption not founded in reality.

Sources: Taphaps, NBC News, BuzzFeed