Some New Jersey police officers are under fire for how they handled the breakup of a fight between a white teenager and a Black teenager at a mall last weekend, after police pinned the Black teen to the ground while allowing the white teen to sit on a couch and watch.
The fight, which took place Saturday at Bridgewater Commons in Bridgewater Township, N.J., was caught on video.
The video shows a group of teens gathered in one of the mall’s seating areas as the two teens argue.
The white teen puts his finger in the Black teen’s face, prompting the Black teen to push his hand away. The white teen then shoves the Black teenager, who begins throwing punches. The two exchange blows and eventually the white teen throws the Black teen to the ground.
Two Bridgewater Township officers then come into frame, separating the two boys — the white teen is placed on a nearby couch by a female officer, while the male officer forces the Black teen back to the ground, kneels on his upper back, and both officers work to handcuff him.
“Yo, it’s ’cause he’s Black. Racially motivated,” someone says off-camera.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said in a tweet Wednesday that the “appearance of what is racially disparate treatment is deeply, deeply disturbing.”
The Bridgewater Township Police Department said in a Facebook post earlier this week that it was aware of the upset caused by the video and the officers’ handling of the incident.
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“We recognize that this video has made members of our community upset and are calling for an internal affairs investigation,” the department wrote, adding that it has asked the local prosecutor’s office to investigate.
Comments on the Facebook post accused the officers of being racist, with many people calling for their resignations.
“This video could not be more clear of the systemic racism that continues to rear its head when it comes to how many police officers engage the black community,” wrote Facebook user Megan L. Pitts.
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“You can investigate all you want; this is plain racism, video doesn’t lie. Both officers should be fired. They were way too comfortable in what they done I bet they’ve done this over and over; they just never got caught at it,” Shelley Vicklund, another Facebook user, shared.
As the video made the rounds on social media, others weighed in expressing their disappointment:
https://twitter.com/BenjaminPDixon/status/1493767941480861698
The Black teen, 14-year-old Z’Kye Husain, spoke to NBC News following the incident, explaining that the altercation started because the other boy was picking on his friend.
“He was kind of saying, like, ‘You’re a little kid, you’re my little pet,’ and stuff like that,” he told NBC New York.
Z’Kye said he “knew not to be scared,” while being handcuffed, and to “just stay calm and not move and do what they tell me to do.”
His mother, Eboné, was more outraged.
“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 told NBC.
“It’s not fair that we are constantly having to fear the cops. I’m just glad it happened where there were a whole bunch of eyes on the situation, ’cause I don’t know what would have happened.”
The white teen, Joseph, denied bullying anyone in an interview with CBS, adding that he was also confused about why he was not handcuffed, too.
“I was confused why they were detaining him and not me. I even offered to get detained when I was on the couch. I put my hands up like this and I said, ‘You guys could detain me.’ She said ‘No, because you were calm,'” Joseph said.
Z’Kye’s family is now working with civil rights attorney Ben Crump, the law firm announced Thursday.
“Z’Kye, an 8th grader, was noble to defend his friend from bullies; however, it is evident that officers immediately assumed that because of the color of Z’Kye’s skin, him acting nobly was not even in the realm of possibility. That video says it all,” Crump said in a news release.
Crump added: “Z’Kye was no more of a threat to those officers than the white teen who fought with him. This is another example of the kind of racial bias that we need to root out of our system of policing. These officers need to be reprimanded and retrained to overcome the implicit bias that results in unequal — and often dangerous — treatment of Black people.”
Neither teen was charged in the incident, but both have been banned from the mall for three years.
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