At the end of this chaotic YouTube video, made at the end of a victory rally by the activists occupying Wall Street and thousands of their supporters, one of the demonstrators is heard hollering: “He ran over his fuckin’ leg!”
Well, I’ve looked at the video three times and that seems a pretty accurate description of what this scooter cop did.
At first, the young man’s leg seems ahead of the scooter’s front wheel, as if maybe the cop ran into him with the scooter. The man on the ground is clearly a legal observer with an official National Lawyers Guild yellow observer hat, seen on the roadway in the photo above. He seems to be in serious agony at this point. So it seems likely he has already suffered some injury.
Then, for some reason (confusion? sadism?) the scooter cop runs the scooter forward over the man’s leg — again.
Now it gets really twisted and disturbing.
The cop seems to park the scooter with its rear wheel on top of the man’s leg. The shot above was taken at this point, as he is re-running over the man’s leg, before he parks it on the leg.
More cops arrive, and at least one of them seems to be whacking the injured man with his club. Why? Police later said because the man had “kicked over the motorscooter.” I’m only a humble journalist, but that seems like a pretty reasonable thing for a man to do in the circumstances. I worked for years as a trained and certified urban ambulance attendant, and I assure you this kind of procedure is not the correct way to deal with someone with a broken leg.
Finally, the injured man is arrested and, while in the emergency room with a fractured leg, is put under police guard.
We hear a lot these days how photos and video can lie. But it’s hard to see how all these cameras are lying. The fact is, photos generally tell the truth; it’s people who lie about them.
I can’t wait for the official NYPD report. Hey, maybe the young legal observer is an Iranian who has a cousin in the Quds Force and was talking with a Mexican on his cellphone about how to assassinate a Saudi diplomat. Or maybe they thought that legal pad in his pocket was actually a bomb in his underwear. We’ll just have to wait for the explanation as to why a cop runs over a man’s leg, then runs over it a second time and parks the scooter on top of his broken leg so he can dismount to strong-arm the man’s allies exercised and concerned about his injuries.