Community leaders in New York City are expressing outrage over the savage beating by police of a Black man in a liquor store who was mistakenly identified as a drug crime suspect and calling for the officers’ firing and arrest.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the violence used by the officers “extremely disturbing and unacceptable,” writing on X that “officers should never treat a person this way.”New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch also described the video of the incident as “extremely disturbing” and said the officers’ use of force was under investigation by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau. In the meantime, she said, they have been stripped of their guns and badges and put on desk duty.
On Tuesday, two plainclothes detectives who worked in the Narcotics Bureau in Brooklyn walked into BK Wine Depot in Brooklyn and attempted to arrest a man they believed matched the description of a suspect seen making a crack cocaine sale nearby: a Black man wearing a white t-shirt and light green shorts.
Timothy L. Brown, a home health aide and security guard who had just gotten off work, was there to buy a bottle of wine. He was wearing teal-colored shorts and a matching bucket hat. As one now-viral, nearly 8-minute video captured by a bystander inside the store begins, police are accosting Brown in front of a glass-doored refrigerator, grabbing his hands and pulling him backward as he yells, “All right, all right.”
Within a second, one of the officers begins punching Brown in the head and then knees him in the abdomen as he struggles to remain standing. As Brown begins to fall over, the officers push him headfirst into a display stand with glass bottles, which crash onto the floor and break. Brown lands on the broken glass and is then punched again in the head by one officer as another drags him across the floor by his ankle.Now just inside the store entrance, the officers scream at Brown to roll over so they can cuff him, while blood streams from a cut on his leg, and he repeatedly tells them he is a security guard. Brown is cuffed on his left hand and seems to struggle to free his right hand as one officer, who has already kicked him in the back and head, stands on his leg, pinning him to the floor…