'Racially Disparate Treatment': Video of New Jersey Police Tackling Black Teenager Provokes Uproar

A viral video of New Jersey police officers tackling a Black teenager during a fight last Saturday with a young white man at a local mall has caused an uproar, also prompting police to open an internal investigation.

The 57-second footage appears to show the teens involved in what looks like a heated argument at the Bridgewater Commons Mall, followed by the two starting to throw punches at each other. Two Bridgewater Township police officers are then seen arriving at the scene and breaking up the fracas.

Disclaimer: this video contains graphic content and may be upsetting to some viewers.

The clip showed, though, that only the Black teenager, who has been identified as an eighth grader named Kye, was handcuffed after violently being thrown to the ground, while the white young man sat and watched from a nearby couch.

Also in the video, a policewoman is seen putting her knee on the back of the young Black man as he lies flat on his stomach as the male police officer handcuffs the teenager.

He subsequently told ABC News that "they [the officers] basically tackled me to the ground and then the one, the male officer put his knee in my back and then he started putting me in cuffs”.

"And then the female officer came over and put her knee on my upper back too and started helping him putting cuffs on me", the young Black man added.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, for his part, responded by tweeting that "although an investigation is still gathering the facts about this incident, I'm deeply disturbed by what appears to be racially disparate treatment in this video".

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He underscored that they "have committed to increasing trust between law enforcement and the people they serve".

The remarks came as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) of New Jersey stressed in a statement that they were "disappointed to see still another police action irrefutably showing the disparate treatment of African Americans in our police institutions". The NAACP called for both officers involved in tackling the Black teenager to be removed from the force pending an investigation.

The Bridgewater Police Department, for its part, admitted on their Facebook page that the video had made members of their community "upset" and promised an internal investigation.

Steffie Bartley, Northeast Regional Director of the anti-racist National Action Network, has since denounced what he described as the "implicit bias" seen in the Bridgewater video.

"Why was the young Black man on the ground with handcuffs while the young white man was sitting on the couch as if he were overseeing?", Barley queried.

He was echoed by the Black teenager's mother, who said in an interview with CNN that she wonders why the police officers concentrated on tackling her son.

"I hate to say this, but if it wasn't for race, then what is it?", Ebone told CNN's Don Lemon. "What made them tackle my son, not the other kid? What made them be so aggressive with my son, not the other kid? Why is the other kid sitting down, looking at my son be humiliated and put into cuffs? It just doesn't make sense. And it makes me angry", the woman who was only identified as Ebone told the broadcaster.

Racial "bias" in US law enforcement agencies remains a thorny issue, especially after African American George Floyd died in May 2020, when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the 46-year-old's neck for nine minutes during his arrest.

Floyd's death sparked mass protests - and riots - against police violence and racial injustice across the United States and in some parts of the world.