A New Jersey police department is being criticized after two officers handcuffed and pinned a black teen to the floor during a weekend mall fight while the white teen involved in the feud was left to sit on a couch.
The Saturday fracas at Bridgewater Commons — and the police response that has sparked an internal investigation — was captured on video that quickly spread on social media.
The teens started out arguing with each other before things turned physical and the two exchanged punches and shoves, the video shows.
Two officers from the Bridgewater Police Department arrived seconds later and pulled the white teen away from the other boy and pushed him onto a nearby couch.
With the black teen already on the floor, the male cop pins him down and places his knee on the boy’s back, the video shows.
The female officer then leaves the white teen alone and joins the male cop, also placing a knee near the back of the black teen’s neck as the two handcuff him.
While the two cops are subduing the black teen, the other boy can be seen standing up and looking at the arrest taking place.
“Yo, it’s ’cause he’s black. Racially motivated,” a person can be heard saying.
The black teen, identified as Kye, told NBC News in an interview that he confronted the other boy, who had been bullying his friend.
“He was kind of saying, like, ‘You’re a little kid, you’re my little pet,’ and stuff like that,” Kye said.
Kye’s mother, who also spoke with the news outlet, slammed the police response.
“It doesn’t take two cops to hold a 14-year-old boy down who’s not resisting, while the other boy is just kind of going free and still going off on my son. It just doesn’t make sense,” she said.
Gov. Phil Murphy said in a statement posted to Twitter that he was “deeply disturbed by what appears to be racially disparate treatment in this video.”
In a Monday Facebook post, the Bridgewater Police Department announced that an internal probe would be conducted.
Commenters to the department’s post voiced outrage at how the officers handled the situation.
“Those officers need to be held accountable! Immediately!” one woman wrote.
“We want an independent investigation. If we are going to restrain youth, both should have been restrained. Blackness is not more threatening,” another person said.
A third Facebook user said: “Clearly they targeted one over the other. It is disgusting and evidences the reason why the African American community has no trust in the system whatsoever. Very upsetting.”
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