The New Jersey police have opened an internal investigation after a viral video on social networks and American televisions which shows two police officers breaking up a fight between two teenagers, a black and a white, handcuffing only the young black man to the ground. The Governor of New Jersey denounced “what appears to be separate treatment based on race“.
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In a video posted by the Storyful platform and picked up by ABC, CBS and CNN on Wednesday, a violent fistfight broke out between two teenagers in a shopping center in Bridgewater Township, New Jersey, a bedroom community in New York. One is a young black, the other is white. The scene, last weekend, was filmed on the telephone by witnesses who did not intervene.
After a few tens of seconds, two uniformed police officers, a woman and a man, arrive behind the teenagers and brutally separate them. But while the young black is violently tackled to the ground by the policeman, his colleague makes the white teenager sit on a sofa and goes to lend a hand to control the young black. We then see the policewoman squat down and put her knee on the shoulders or the neck of the young black man, flat on his stomach, while the man handcuffs him with his hands behind his back.
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“Separate treatment based on race»
The black teenager told ABC on Tuesday evening, February 15, that the two police officers had him “pinned to the ground” and “the man put his knee on (his) back before starting to handcuff (him)“. “Then the woman came, placed her knee on my upper back and started to help handcuff me while (the other teenager) sat on the bench watching the whole scene“, he testified, under the first name of “Kye“. No image shows the result of the arrest of the black teenager, nor what became of the young white man who was not arrested.
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“We need to increase trust between those who enforce the law and the people they serve“explained Governor Phil Murphy. Bridgewater Township Police acknowledged on Facebook that the video had “upset members of our community» and announced a «internal investigation” with “request for assistance from the Somerset County Attorney’s Office“, county town of Bridgewater. Asked by AFP on Thursday, a spokesperson for the New Jersey prosecutor’s office assured that his “services were working closely with those of the Somerset County prosecutor who is leading the investigation» and that they had to «ensure thorough, fair and independent investigations into incidents related to police use of force and behavior“.
On Wednesday evening, the National Action Network anti-racism association, at the forefront of the May 2020 murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer who had asphyxiated him with his knee, said to itself “very disturbed» by the video which «insinuates that there is an implicit bias in the response of the police officers“.
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