New York – Police and protesters clashed on the streets of New York City on Tuesday after an arrest that some say seemed more like a kidnapping. As reported by CBS New York, the video of the arrest posted on social media is generating outrage.
Brooklyn resident Mike Laster has been protesting across the country since the death of George Floyd In May. He says that Tuesday night a large group had peacefully established to march and feed the homeless in a park on Second Avenue and 25th Street in Kips Bay when the bicycle police appeared and things got out of hand. control.
“They grabbed a transgender woman and threw her out,” Laster said. “I tried to separate myself from an officer and the protest and he threw his bike at me … They cut off my hands and all that.”
Among the plainclothes men and the unmarked van, Laster and others say it looked like a kidnapping.
But New York police say the woman they arrested, 18-year-old Nikki Stone, was wanted for spraying the lenses of six police cameras during separate criminal incidents in and around City Hall Park, and said this squad use unmarked vehicles to find wanted suspects. .
They also say that the agents who arrested him were robbed with stones and bottles. Police say seven officers were generally injured Tuesday, four were rushed to a local hospital and three were treated at the scene.
“If violence presents us, we have to reciprocate that violence,” Laster said.
Police say as the night wore on, protesters blocked traffic. They arrested a dozen people.
Amid the screams during the tense confrontation, people can be heard insisting that they were never violent, saying, “We were at peace.”
Others shouted blasphemies at the police, even challenged them to spray them with pepper spray.
As for the arrest video, it won’t quietly disappear.
The City Council speaker and public defender are concerned and concerned, and both are asking for answers.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said in a tweet that the video of a “protester in New York City dumped in an unmarked pickup truck – is terrifying and should be unacceptable to all those who respect the constitutional rights on which this country was founded. ”
He called for “an immediate explanation for this anonymous use of force.”
The LGBTQ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, called the video “deeply troubling” and demanded that New York authorities explain Stone’s whereabouts.
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