A Minneapolis cop said he was being “officer friendly” when he threatened to break the legs of a young man he had handcuffed.
“Plain and simple, if you fuck with me, I’m gonna break your legs before you get a chance to run,’ the cop was captured on video saying.
“I don’t screw around.”
“Who said I was going to run?” the youth asked.
“I’m just giving you a head’s up. I’m trying to be officer friendly, right now,” the cop said.
“Can you tell me why I’m being arrested?”
“Because I feel like arresting you,” the cop responded.
The 30-second video was posted on Twitter on March 19 and has been retweeted 302 times as of this writing, drawing attention from the local media, which determined the young man was released with no charges after he was suspected of stealing cars along with several friends, who were also handcuffed and detained.
Police say the matter is “under investigation,” which is their way of trying to sweep it under the carpet.
According to Fox 9 in Minneapolis:
Officers eventually told them they were suspected of stealing the car and they were let go without being arrested. Mohamed and his friends are of Somali descent and said they feel they were racially profiled, but also said the officer was simply disrespectful without a reason. A Minneapolis police spokesperson said the incident is under investigation and they are unable to comment.
Mylan Masson, a former Minneapolis Police Officer, now teaches at the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Education Center in Brooklyn Park.
“We teach the students to be polite, and we always say sir and ma’am,” she said.
Masson said the other officers in the video did just that, but the lone officer heard using profanities and making a threat is not the way police are trained to handle traffic stops.
“I certainly would want to know the whole call and see what happened, what provoked him or her to do something and then to retrain them and then say this is not appropriate,” Masson said.
Fayfal Mohamed, 17, was one of the four men in the car that were handcuffed and detained for 45 minutes.
“We were just leaving the YMCA where we had been playing basketball when we were pulled over,” he said in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime Friday afternoon.
It started with one cop, but soon five cops sped up on the scene, ordering the youths out at gunpoint.
His friend was the one who pulled out a phone to start recording, but Officer Friendly, whose real name is Officer Webber, was not too friendly about it.
“The cop grabbed his phone and pushed him against the car,” Mohamed said.
Mohamed said they were each handcuffed and placed in separate patrol cars before they were released.
“They never told us why they were handcuffing us,” he said.
Mohamed was the one who posted the video on Twitter.
