Results tagged “bodyslam”

It was almost a year ago that a Times Square tourist happened to videotape a police officer's seemingly unprovoked assault on a cyclist during a Critical Mass group bike ride. The video, which depicts rookie cop Patrick Pogan slamming 30-year-old cyclist Christopher Long off his bike, sparked widespread outrage and ended up costing Pogan his job (getting caught filing a false police report didn't help his case, either). Long is now living in rural Wisconsin and working on a farm, but according to his lawyer, "There is psychological trauma, which explains why he is not living in New York City right now. It is a terrible experience for him to go through." So naturally he's suing the city, for $1.5 million, to help ease the pain.

As expected, NYPD officer Patrick Pogan, the rookie cop caught on video slamming a cyclist to the curb in a seemingly unprovoked assault during a July Critical Mass ride, turned himself in this morning. The grand jury indictment was then unsealed at State Supreme Court in Manhattan, and, according to NY1, Pogan was arraigned on a misdemeanor assault charge and a felony charge of filing a false report. (After arresting cyclist Christopher Long that night, Pogan accused Long of attempting assault, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct, contending that Long rode his bike straight into him, knocking them both down. Those charges against Long were later dropped.)

Surprising no one, the cyclist who was captured on videotape being violently slammed off his bike by a rookie cop during a July Critical Mass ride plans to sue the city. In his first interview, Christopher Long also tells Chelsea Now that after Officer Patrick Pogan knocked him to the curb, he stood over Long and asked, "Do you wanna try that again?" Long also says he thinks Pogan "is going to be a scapegoat in this situation because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time...I think that the department really helped him do what he did, because he felt safe to act that way. He felt entitled to act that way. That’s the department, culturally. The department set him up for failure. He committed a crime, he assaulted me. He didn’t do that by himself." Long spent 27 hours in the Tombs after his arrest and was charged with attempted assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. The D.A. finally dropped the charges earlier this month; Pogan is still under investigation.

On July 30th, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly promised that New Yorkers would be able to send video and text straight to police in a “relatively short period of time.” And he actually delivered! The image software, which cost about $250,000, also serves the city's 311 non-emergency hot line, so don't hesitate to gather cell phone video of potholes and graffiti. According to WABC, New York is the first American city with the capability to accept images. 911 callers who have cell phone video or photos of a crime are instructed to inform the operator, and a detective with the NYPD's cool-sounding Real Time Crime Center will call back to receive the images. The evidence can also be submitted anonymously (details here), and by next year photos sent in by bystanders will be transmitted to patrol cars in the area.

UPDATE: As expected, the Manhattan District Attorney has dropped all charges against Christopher Long, per this press release from Times Up.

NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters yesterday that in a “relatively short period of time” people will be able to send “video and text straight to 911 to increase the flow of information.” Kelly didn’t go into details about how the technology would work, but he did say that “generally speaking, it’s helpful when people record an event taking place that helps us during an investigation.”

Environmental group Times Up! is taking advantage of all the publicity generated by the video of a cop shoving a cyclist off his bike by reminding everyone that this is hardly the first such incident, nor the only one caught on video. The group points out that in 2007 one Richard Vazquez was taken down by a cop in Times Square during a Critical Mass ride, and in 2006 Adrienne Wheeler, a Critical Mass legal observer, was pulled off her bike by then-NYPD-Assistant-Chief Bruce Smolka, who's since retired. (The city settled with Wheeler for $37,000.) In a statement, Times Up! asserts that, “Unfortunately the July 25, 2008 incident is part of a pattern of targeting Critical Mass bike riders.” What's also unfortunate is that the production values on these old videos fail to live up to the new gold standard for police brutality porn.

The cyclist who was videotaped being body slammed off his bike in an apparently unprovoked attack by an NYPD officer during Friday night’s Critical Mass ride has been identified as Christopher Long, a 29-year-old resident of Bloomfield, New Jersey who works at the Union Square Greenmarket. His boss tells the Daily News that Long is an Army veteran and "mild-mannered environmental activist." Craig Radhuber, 54, was riding behind Long Friday night and describes incident: “All of a sudden the cop picked this kid out and bodychecked him. I couldn't believe what was going on. [The officer] body-slammed this kid off the bicycle so hard that he went from the lane to the curb.”