A Texas cop who was busted on dash cam running a red light denied running the light only minutes later when confronted by a *Photography is Not a Crime* reporter.
“I don’t know what red light you’re talking about,” Austin police officer Maris Daron Heyward told PINAC reporter Phillip Turner, who followed the officer into a parking lot Thursday after he recorded the cop running the red light on his dash cam.
“It was a green light,” officer Heyward insists while sitting in the driver’s seat of his police SUV.
“You sure?”
“I’m positive, yes sir,” he assures Turner.
“What’s your badge number again?” Turner asks the officer.
“7212.”
“7212?”
“Yes, sir, yeah–I had a green light. Yeah, I don’t know what red light you’re talking about.”
“It was red. I promise you,” Turner informs the officer.
“Nah, I had the green light.”
“You sure?” Turner asks again.
“Yes, sir, I got everything on,” Heyward says, presumably referring to his dash cam.
“Okay,” Turner replies before getting back on his way to work.
In a story we [__reported about last August__](http://photographyisnotacrime.com/2016/08/03/pinac-correspondent-pulls-over-texas-trooper-for-speeding-and-receives-immediate-apology/), Turner, who runs the YouTube channel, [__The Battousai,__](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdiRpq3iPQqlicPX38G5AbQ) was given a speedy apology after pulling over a Texas state trooper also captured on his dash cam driving by him at approximately 90 mph.
“The reason I was trying to pull you over is that you flew right by me,” Turner can be heard asking in that video, after asking the trooper to step in front of his car’s dash cam to capture the conversation.
“I mean you were going pretty fast back there. Are you in an emergency or something?”
But instead of deflecting blame like officer Heyward in the video below, the trooper quickly owned it and apologized, admitting he had no reason to be driving at such a high speed.
“I apologize, sir, I didn’t mean to,” the trooper said in the video.
The Austin Police Department, where Heyward is employed, presented a proposed a FY budget for 2018 to the Austin City Council Wednesday stating their priorities for the upcoming year includes hiring more officers and giving their current cops raises in pay, according to [__KXAN__](http://kxan.com/2017/02/15/austin-police-propose-smaller-budget-for-next-year/).
“I know the officers are looking forward to a new labor contract because they would like a little stability in their life after the last several years . . . where they feel like they have been attacked and seeing police officer shootings in the media on a regular basis and our difficulty in hiring,” Ken Casaday, President of the Austin Police Association said in a local interview.
No Austin police officers were attacked in Turner’s video.
