Undercover NYPD Officer Filmed Punching Handcuffed Black Teenager
It’s been the year of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Akai Gurley, a year in which police brutality and racial discrimination have been at the forefront of everyone’s minds. You might think that given that, and given Mayor De Blasio’s recent decision to meet with protestors and all the demonstrations and the anger and the heightened scrutiny that police are under from the public, maybe, maybe we might be able to close out the month—or hell, even the week—without another incident of unnecessary police violence against an unarmed black man. But you’d be wrong, apparently. A new video has surfaced showing a plainclothes police officer rushing up during an arrest and repeatedly punching a handcuffed black suspect. To quote a woman bystander in the video, who identifies herself as a lawyer and says that the boy they’re arresting is just 12 years old, “I can’t believe he just did that after everything that’s happened.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cO2BLmc6yQ#t=151
In the video, a group of three white policemen and women surround the young black man as he’s getting cuffed on the hood of a car. The plainclothes police officer, dressed in camouflage, runs up to the scene and clearly punches him several times in rapid succession. “Hey, Hey, Hey!” one woman watching the incident unfold yells. “Stop it! Get off of him!”
Police officials have placed the incident under internal investigation. According to officers, the suspect who was punched was one of two young men arrested for assaulting a victim with a cane on Monday. Neither the suspect nor the policeman have yet been identified.