A young black couple who had just come off a date and were all cozied up in a Brooklyn Subway train were given a day to forget after they were abruptly roughed up by about 10 NYPD officers in a case of mistaken identity.
According to the New York Post, officers received a call of a man brandishing a gun at the subway on February 24 and made their way to locate the suspect. The officers alleged that the man they confronted on the No. 2 train at Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn matched the description the caller gave.
The officers, believing the man had a gun, tried to eject him from the subway car, despite protests from the couple who told them they had done nothing wrong.
RELATED STORIES
The video of the incident was shared by Twitter user Neely Grobani. Describing what happened, she said: “The train stopped at Eastern Parkway, the doors opened and closed, and instead of taking off for the next stop, cops swarmed outside the car I was in.”
She added: “As soon as the doors opened, the cops rushed in a [sic] grabbed the young man I was sitting across from. Then they grabbed his girlfriend as soon as she tried to follow him to figure out what was going on.”
In the video, the man can be seen asking the officers what he has done as he was being forcefully pulled out.
“What did I do? What did I do? I just came off a date,” he can be heard explaining.
The lady, who can be seen in the melee, is also heard shouting: “Get off of me — get the f–k off of me!”
“What are you pulling him over for?” she asks, as she was being led off the cab in handcuffs.
The officers subsequently searched the train but did not find the gun they were looking for.
“It became really clear that whatever they were looking for was not on this couple,” Grobani told PIX11. “It was stressful and I wasn’t sure what I could do in that situation — and the one thing I could do was film it, so I did.”
The couple were later charged with disorderly conduct and released, according to the police.
“Whether what they did was legal or not — it didn’t feel right to me,” Grobani added. “The fact they were able to forcefully remove this couple from the train, who had just been sitting there sleeping without telling them why, is concerning to me and upsetting.”
“The fact that they were looking for something and there were people on the train, they could’ve asked: ‘Did anyone see something?’ They didn’t engage at all. It was upsetting and concerning to me.”
