Free Thought Project – by Matt Agorist
New York, NY — Fights between adolescents are an unfortunately common reality. Children attempting to assert their dominance over one another often find themselves coming to blows on the school playground, bus stop, or other places as school lets out. This was the case for two sisters this week.
Most school fights end with no serious injury and teachers often break them up easily as the students then prepare to face their punishment. But when an NYPD officer got involved this week, a bus stop quarrel turned into an extremely violent event.
Cellphone video of the incident was later posted to Instagram and it was so disturbing that the officer involved was immediately placed on unpaid administrative leave.
According to police, NYPD officers — not school cops — responded to a fight between two young girls at a bus stop near Edwin Markham Middle School at around 2:45 p.m. on Tuesday. When one of the officers attempted to intervene, all hell broke loose.
“I jumped in and the cops came and were supposed to be breaking it up, but the cops got into the fight,” the girl, Kyonna Robinson, told The New York Post on Wednesday.
“Then everyone was just in handcuffs and my sister [was] in handcuffs,” she said, “and I went up to my sister and asked the cops, ‘What are you doing?’ and he pushed me and then I hit him two times and then he hit me 11 times,” she said.
“I thought they would break up the fight. I didn’t think they would get into the fight.”
When the bystanders, all children, witnessed the officer getting involved, they tried in vain to pull the small girl away. Unfortunately for the girl, the officer — identified as Nicholas Scalzo — kept waylaying on her head.
“They’re supposed to be protected by the police officers and I didn’t expect them to get hurt,” said Taneesha Robinson, the child’s mother, who added that her daughter is doing better and “basically has a headache now.”
NBC 4 reports that the union for the suspended officer, the Police Benevolent Association, said in a statement that the officers involved “are entitled to due process, not summary judgment based on a few seconds of video…What is needed now is a thorough investigation of the entire circumstances, not just what has been posted online.”
While it is certainly true that everyone is entitled to due process, the officer will be hard-pressed to justify such a glaring use of force against a small child that was half his size. Even the mayor had a hard time justifying the violence he witnessed in the video.
“It was NYPD — not school safety agents — and so we are going to look at the bodycam from the police officers. That’s why the body cams are good. We’re going to use the video that was posted on Instagram. That’s where it first came to my attention,” NYC Mayor Eric Adams said during a Wednesday press conference, adding “I was not happy with what I saw on the video.”
Watch that video for yourself below.
We saw how lovingly the NYPD treats Proud Boys. Here’s how they treat Black teenage girls
— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) January 4, 2023