A Brooklyn man is suing the NYPD after he claims he was illegally stopped-and-frisked by NYPD officers last summer—and when he went to take a photo of their license plate, they ran him over.
Hashim Haynes, 26, was walking to his home on Elton Street in East New York around 9:20 p.m. on Aug. 21st when two cop cars stopped him. He says they frisked him without telling him why. Then when they got back into their vehicles, Haynes got in front of one car to take the photo, and the officer behind the wheel rammed into him; while he was on the ground, a cop searched through his pockets again.
You can see everything play out, including the moment the cop car slams into Haynes, in the surveillance video below.
Haynes, who works as a community assistant at the Taxi & Limousine Commission, was not arrested or issued a summons during the incident.
"The initial stop and frisk was over nothing—Mr. Haynes was just walking into his house after a day of work," Haynes's lawyer, Gabriel Harvis, told us. "There was no explanation provided by the officers." Harvis, who specializes in civil rights cases, said his client was a victim of racial profiling: "I view the vehicular assault itself as an effort by officers to leave the scene without detection. I don't know what they did after the fact, but I doubt they filed any kind of official reports."
In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactic was unconstitutional. When Mayor de Blasio came into office, he vowed to uphold the ruling and put a gradual end to the practice. There were 13,604 stop and frisks recorded by the NYPD during the first two quarters of 2015, compared with 685,724 recorded for the entire year during its height in 2011.
Haynes, who injured his back in the incident, is seeking unspecified damages for the stop and the alleged use of excessive force. "This incident is a wakeup call to anyone who thinks the NYPD's stop-and-frisk practices have changed under this administration," Harvis told the Daily News. "If anything, the problem has worsened as officers such as these will seemingly go to any length to conceal their misconduct."
