A video recording of New York City police officers handcuffing two young Black males shows a plainclothes cop throwing at least two body punches into one of the suspects who was already pinned against a car.
“Hey! Hey! Hey! Stop it!” a woman yells as the plainclothes cop begins to punch the suspect. “Get off of him!”
On the video, the suspect who was beaten by the officer did nothing to provoke his response. He wasn’t resisting arrest and did not physically attack any of the officers. The unwarranted body blows speaks volumes about the frequency with which police use excessive and unnecessary force on Black people.
The date of the assault is unknown, but the video was published on Youtube on Dec. 17. The publisher, Sarah Doneghy, wrote in the description of the video that the kids being arrested were 12. According to her account, they were accused of pushing down a classmate, but the victim said that the two kids in handcuffs weren’t his attackers.
“I can’t believe he just did that after everything that’s happened,” a woman’s voice can be heard saying on the video.
The assault on the handcuffed young Black male comes after months of protests against police brutality. New York City alone has seen tens of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets since the announcements of the grand jury decisions in Ferguson, Mo., and in their own city. The clear video evidence of the officer attack should be enough to prove he was out of line. However, the clear video evidence of Eric Garner’s death by a police officer in Staten Island wasn’t enough to get an indictment of the NYPD officer that choked him to death.
The bystander who made the video recorded the arrest all the way until the suspect and two other Black males were placed into police cars. The police said the two were arrested for assaulting another person with a cane, the New York Daily News reports.
“The incident is under review and the allegations have been referred to our Internal Affairs Bureau,” a NYPD spokesman told the Daily Mail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnoKUW4nFXc
