Last-minute Christmas shoppers take a break from shopping at Bridgewater Commons Mall on December 24, 2010, in Bridgewater TWP, New Jersey. | Source: Matt Rainey / Getty
Civil rights leaders were reacting with disgust and anger to what they described as a racist police response to a mall fight between two teenagers in New Jersey.
The fight, which took place recently at Bridgewater Commons Mall in Bridgewater Township, was recorded on video by a bystander and posted to social media, where it went viral this week. The video showed a 14-year-old boy identified only as Z’kye and a white teenage boy confronting each other before devolving into a full-blown fistfight. Onlookers who appeared to be fellow teenagers surrounded them as the fight spilled out of the seating area in which the fight started.
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That’s when two fully uniformed police officers could be seen running into the frame. One, a woman officer, yanked the white boy aside. But the other officer, a man, violently wrestled Z’kye to the ground and handcuffed him as the woman officer joined in to employ a restraining hold with her knee on his back. Z’kye was compliant and did not resist.
All the while, the white boy — who was just as guilty as the Black teen — was shown sitting in the background watching unscathed. No handcuffs, no kneeling restraint, nothing.
A voice from an unidentified person could be heard saying on the video, “It’s ’cause he’s Black, racially motivated.”
That’s where the nearly one-minute-long video ends abruptly. Watch it below.
In the end, Z’kye was arrested and the white boy was not, Northeast Regional Director of National Action Network, Rev. Steffie Bartley, Sr., said in an email to NewsOne. He pointed to the disparate treatment for the same behavior and suggested racism was to blame.
“I have seen the videos regarding the excessive force incident at the Bridgewater Mall. The video that I have seen is quite disturbing and suggests implicit bias as it relates to the police officers’ response,” Bartley said in part. “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?”
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