The man squaring up to the Coral Springs officer did not know who he was squaring up to.
Body camera footage of Marlon Moraes on a March 27 traffic stop surfaced online this weekend and spread quickly. Moraes, 38, has worked as a police officer in South Florida since 2024.
The clip shows a man challenging Moraes verbally in a parking lot and closing the distance on him.
Moraes stayed where he was and told him he was one step away from making things worse for himself. The man took two more steps forward. Moraes swept him to the pavement with one arm, and other officers moved in to handcuff him.
The stop itself was not his. Reporting on the fuller version of the footage indicates officers had pulled a woman over on suspicion of DUI, and that the man was a passenger arguing that he had not been driving.
Moraes joined the Davie Police Department in June 2024 and moved to Coral Springs later that year.
The timing was something. The footage went around on the same weekend Moraes returned to fighting, beating Maximiliano Perez by unanimous decision in the LMC 2 main event in Sao Paulo on August 28. It was his first win in seven years.
He retired in 2023 and announced a comeback in 2025. Moraes won the World Series of Fighting bantamweight title in 2014 and defended it five times before signing with the UFC in 2017. He beat Aljamain Sterling and Jimmie Rivera there, and his February 2019 win over Raphael Assuncao stood as his last until last month. He lost to Henry Cejudo for the vacant bantamweight title at UFC 238 later that year, closed his UFC run on a four-fight losing streak, and went 0-3 in the PFL.
