A man mistaken by police for a drug dealer at a Brooklyn liquor store told officers, “I’m not resisting”, moments before they beat him and dragged him across a floor strewn with broken glass, according to a CBS report.
Timothy Brown, who had gone into the BK Wine Deport in Boerum Hill to grab a bottle of wine after work, said he was complying with officers when they attacked him.
“He said, ‘You’re under arrest,’” Brown told CBS. “I remember being grabbed and shoved and he said, ‘Don’t resist.’ And I say, ‘I’m not resisting.’
“They slammed me up against the glass, you know, repeatedly hitting me in the temple, in my head, you know? You see my eye’s black,” Brown added. “Several bottles were broken in the liquor store because they swung me and they actually dragged me on the floor in a glass, and that can be seen on camera.”
The pair of Brooklyn North narcotics detectives involved in the clash thought the man matched the description of someone who had just made a drug sale, a police source said. He was wearing similar clothes as the suspect, but had no drugs on him when he was arrested in the store on Hoyt St. near Baltic St., the source said.
“I was like, you know what? I’m going back to the precinct to make sure he’s gonna be OK, because I felt like the police was going to beat him up some more,” Brown’s mother, Donna Brown, told CBS. “Could you look at a video of your child being dragged like that? It’s disgusting. It really is. It’s disgusting. And they do it all the time, to our Black and Brown people, all the time.”
Brown was issued a desk appearance ticket by cops for resisting arrest and obstruction of government administration, officials said. A spokesman for the Brooklyn District Attorney announced they would be declining to prosecute those charges.
The two officers involved in Brown’s arrest were placed on modified duty and stripped of their guns and badges; the incident is being investigated by the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau.