WATCH ABOVE: Valerie Castro explains what happened when an Uber driver was pulled over for honking his horn at a plain-clothes NYPD officer.
TORONTO – A NYPD detective is in hot water after video was recorded and shared of the officer’s road rage tirade aimed at an Uber driver in New York.
Sanjay Seth was a passenger in the back of an Uber taxi Tuesday afternoon on the west side of Manhattan when his unidentified driver allegedly gestured to another driver as he drove by a vehicle that refused to signal while it parked on a road at a green light.
“The Uber driver pulled around and gestured that he should use his blinker, casually and non-offensively, and kept driving us,” Seth explained in a YouTube description of the event.
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Moments later, Seth’s driver had been pulled over by an unmarked car with flashing lights. It was the same driver they had just passed – and he was angry. Worst of all, he had a badge.
“OK? Do you understand me? I don’t know what [expletive] planet you think you’re on right now.”
The New York Daily News has reported that the angry man in question is Detective Patrick Cherry of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He was purportedly on his way to work after visiting a colleague in critical condition at a nearby hospital.
“I don’t know where you’re coming from, where you think you’re appropriate in doing that; that’s not the way it works,” Cherry continued to berate the driver who had a foreign accent. “How long have you been in this country?”
The driver offered multiple apologies despite Seth and a fellow passenger telling him he had done nothing wrong.
After all the yelling, Cherry didn’t issue a ticket, saying that the Uber driver was “not important enough”.
Seth captured most of the tirade in a video that is over three minutes long and shared it on YouTube. He also helped it go viral by alerting a multitude of local media outlets to its existence via Twitter.
The NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau was investigating but has handed the case over to the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). Seth, for his part, planned to testify Wednesday.
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