A video posted to Facebook captured two Buffalo police officers in the midst of an illegal search after threatening violence against a man walking down the sidewalk.
His crime: apparently, the man had been rude while trying to make his way by a group of people sitting on the sidewalk.
Some words were exchanged.
And the man kept walking down the sidewalk.
“Not out of the norm for that part of the city. Guy kept walking, folks kept hanging out,” Ed Sparky Lawton, who recorded the video and posted it on Facebook, described.
“Then enters the, inconveniently, positioned police car. Officer leaning out the window… Yelling back at the at the gentleman,” Lawton wrote.
“Want me to kick your ass?” a Buffalo cop named Dressler asked the man.
“Fuck off,” the guy yelled in reply.
There were a few more words before Lawton, who witnessed the exchange, began recording and confronting the cops.
“B District 464. Searching this man because he was just being rude and agitated here, thinking they have the right to violate rights.”
“I’m not violating anything,” the man replies.
“No, they’re violating your rights. This is an illegal search,” Lawton says.
“I know. I know that.”
Lawton begins confronting Dressler about the illegal search since there was no crime committed.
Officer Dressler says the man committed the crime of disorderly conduct, but then drops the man’s bag he was in the middle of searching.
“It’s a crime. He could go to jail for it,” Dressler explains.
That’s when another man with a cell phone camera enters the scene, questioning officer Dressler.
“You said you were going to kick his ass, right?”
Dressler points to the man he was searching.
“You said fuck you. Give me your badge number.”
Officer Dressler and his partner officer Hensley resist giving Lawton their badge numbers as they leave the scene in a police vehicle.
Neither of them bother to buckle their seat belts before the video ends.
Read Lawton’s full description of the incident on his Facebook page.
