The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has deferred the charges against a man caught up in the police-involved social distancing fracas in the East Village.
Now-viral cellphone video of the Saturday incident showed plainclothes Officer Francisco Garcia slapping and punching 33-year-old Donni Wright over an alleged social distancing violation after cops broke up a group near the corner of East Ninth Street and Avenue D.
“Move the f—k back right now!” a taser-toting Garcia yells as he breaks away from the melee to confront a group of bystanders, including Wright.
“What you flexing for? Don’t flex,” Garcia said, according to the clip.
Garcia can then be seen wrestling Wright to the sidewalk and whacking him as another cop moves in to help cuff him.
Wright was ultimately charged with assault of a police officer, menacing and resisting arrest, but those charges were put off by the DA’s office pending further investigation, a spokesperson said.
Garcia was stripped of his gun and placed on modified duty, pending a probe by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau.
Before the incident involving Wright, cops arrested two others on charges of resisting arrest. One was also charged with marijuana possession and the other was hit with criminal possession of a weapon for a stun gun she was allegedly carrying.
Commenting on the wild incident on NY1 Monday morning, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said: “This did start out as a social distancing encounter — it escalated into what you see on this video with a total of three arrests made, recovery of a small amount of I believe marijuana, recovery of a Taser that was not an NYPD Taser in this encounter.”
“The officer involved was placed on modified assignment that evening while we conducted an internal review by our internal affairs unit of the entire encounter,” Shea said. “So that’s where we stand now, there’s still some interviews being done.”
The top cop added that the department is “trying to gain all the facts,” but noted that there was “certainly some tactics that I was not happy with.”
https://nypost.com/2020/05/04/manha...ter_impression=true&__twitter_impression=true
Now-viral cellphone video of the Saturday incident showed plainclothes Officer Francisco Garcia slapping and punching 33-year-old Donni Wright over an alleged social distancing violation after cops broke up a group near the corner of East Ninth Street and Avenue D.
“Move the f—k back right now!” a taser-toting Garcia yells as he breaks away from the melee to confront a group of bystanders, including Wright.
“What you flexing for? Don’t flex,” Garcia said, according to the clip.
Garcia can then be seen wrestling Wright to the sidewalk and whacking him as another cop moves in to help cuff him.
Wright was ultimately charged with assault of a police officer, menacing and resisting arrest, but those charges were put off by the DA’s office pending further investigation, a spokesperson said.
Garcia was stripped of his gun and placed on modified duty, pending a probe by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau.
Before the incident involving Wright, cops arrested two others on charges of resisting arrest. One was also charged with marijuana possession and the other was hit with criminal possession of a weapon for a stun gun she was allegedly carrying.
Commenting on the wild incident on NY1 Monday morning, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said: “This did start out as a social distancing encounter — it escalated into what you see on this video with a total of three arrests made, recovery of a small amount of I believe marijuana, recovery of a Taser that was not an NYPD Taser in this encounter.”
“The officer involved was placed on modified assignment that evening while we conducted an internal review by our internal affairs unit of the entire encounter,” Shea said. “So that’s where we stand now, there’s still some interviews being done.”
The top cop added that the department is “trying to gain all the facts,” but noted that there was “certainly some tactics that I was not happy with.”
https://nypost.com/2020/05/04/manha...ter_impression=true&__twitter_impression=true
