Oh, what the insanity of YouTube hath wrought: The Queens DA's office has charged a 21 year old Astoria Gazi Abura with criminal impersonation after he posed as a "plainclothes New York City police officer" and stopped a 14 year old Christian Tivino last year. Abura and his friends demanded to see the teen's ID, asked him to put his hands in the air, and threatened jail him. Now, this incident might not have been reported, except Abura and his friends were taping the incident and put it on YouTube this summer. One of Tivino's friends told him he saw him on a "Crack DVD... The Re-Up//Crack Cops" clip, so Tivino went to the authorities. Well, when you tag your clips "Queens," it's likely that people in Queens will watch them.
Abura now faces a year in jail, if found guilty. Abura's lawyer says his client is innocent and that everyone in the videos (including a 31 year old who was stopped and whose ID was "scanned " by Abura in a car's CD player) had cooperated. Lawyer Damien Brown even suggested that Tivino was now embarrassed about the video. The police are looking for Abura's two other actors/accomplices in the clips, which have all been taken down.
