Posted on 01/27/2014 11:16:55 AM PST by deks
“We can have police efforts focused on pedestrian safety without violating the civil rights of our citizens,” said Wong’s lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein, who will file a notice of the lawsuit on Monday, naming the city, NYPD and unidentified officers as defendants.
Wong maintains the traffic signal was green when he stepped off the curb at the southeast corner of 96th St. and Broadway to cross, but it may have turned red by the time the octogenarian reached the other side, where an unidentified cop stopped him and demanded to see his identification.
Wong speaks only Cantonese and Spanish, but understood the meaning of the officer’s demand for “ID.”
When the cop began walking away with his card, Wong said he followed after him. “I was very puzzled and I was very scared,” he said. “I had no idea why I had been stopped. I used Cantonese and said give me back my ID.”
In response to Wong’s repeated requests for his card back, the cop whipped out handcuffs and spoke into his portable radio. “I got more scared,” Wong said.
Several officers raced over and grabbed Wong, pushing him against the wall of a building. Wong said he was pushed to the ground and struck his head, blacking out. When he regained consciousness, blood was streaming down his face and his hands were cuffed behind his back.
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
Then refund him all the taxes he's paid via his business..............Fair enough?
Your comment is more evidence of the bigotry that is both taking over this site and being ignored...............
Disagree. Clearly, excessive force for the situation. Cops are outa control. I hope he wins the suit in some significant amount. Cops need to assess the situation and then apply the necessary force to control the situation. This is simply another case of BS by the LEOs.
Bottom Line: If you can’t physically control an 84 year old man without bloodying him, you have *no* business wearing a badge and a gun. Period.
I don’t care what his citizenship status is or if he came in through Cuba or if he has been scamming Social Security. Those are wholly unrelated issues that can be investigated and prosecuted seperately. They have no bearing on *multiple* NYPD cops failing to physically control an apparent (from the looks of the photos) physically inferior 84 year old man. They should have been able to control him *AND* if need be, keep him from injuring himself while they detained him. Period. The end. No if’s, And’s or But’s about it. From the instant they detained him, they were responsible for his safety. After all, before knocking him out and bloodying him, the reasoning for detaining him in the first place was purportedly for his own safety? (no humorous intent there)
It is high time individual City, County, State and Federal cops are assigned personal responsibility for the consequnces of their malfeasance/misfeasance. AS more and more of these incidents crop up, it should be *painfully* obvious that we need to weed out the knee-jerk, badge-heavy “Barney Fife’s” and recruit & retain more level-headed, common-sense minded “Andy Griffith’s”.
!
This bigotry you speak of is nauseating on this thread and other threads concerning this particular subject.
I keep swinging at it. So it is not unopposed.
But I am finding it to be particularly troubling. I keep thinking I know what a “conservative” is. But I am figuring out that a conservative means conserving racial purity to some people.
To me, Conservative means reading Jefferson, Adams, Washington and Franklin. Using their values and philosophy as written (not always as lived) as a guide on the relationship between government and people. Government by the and for the People as they said.
But Conservative can mean cops billy clubbing people, dishing out extra judicial punishment. Lots and lots of law and order, and law and order at any price. It may reflect the demographics of this web site. I don’t know.
It's very common. There are two Chinese restaurants in my area owned by elderly Chinese but run by their American raised children. The elders oversee the business but are only able to communicate via broken english.
You'd be surprised at the numbers of first generation immigrants who came to work in the auto plants here in Detroit back in the '40's and 50's and 60's who still couldn't speak fluent English when it came time to retire........
So don't be so free to judge this guy or anyone else for that matter, simply on your perception on how they should be able to communicate.......Especially after being a contributing member of our society........
Well stated...however I expect there will be responses by some posters who reply with their eyes closed.
What right was violated? The right to have cops speak Mandarin?
You said it better than I could..........I can't agree more.
I’ll judge who ever I want anytime I want. If you don’t like it too bad. Go lecture someone else.
I think people get their history from the Godfather movies, where Vito Corleone became fluent in English despite having been born in Italy. Even in the movies, Vito showed up stateside at the tender age of 8 or 9 and got to go to school full-time. His real-life counterpart, Lucky Luciano, came to America at the age of 10 and spent some years in school as a full-time student. Most immigrants who come as adults have to start working as soon as they arrive. Between working, spending time on day-to-day things like cooking (since there's no money for eating out), shopping, finding a wife and then raising children, there's no time for English.
“84 years old and can’t speak any English except for “ID”? Send him back. “
So it’s ok just to beat him and handcuff him? What if the issue was just a bad hearing aid battery? Beat that one as well?
No. I never said that. You assume too much.
No you didn’t and possibly I was a bit over zealous in my post.
But 84 year Mr. Wong shouldn’t be beaten by the police just because he can’t instantly respond to a police officers commands.
All of us can be in Mr Wong’s place for one reason or the other when we are 84.
People shouldn’t have to fear the police; it seems we hear too many of these stories.
That's pretty obvious and the mantra of a true bigot....So much for that compassionate conservatism stuff, eh?
What’s obvious here is your dislike for people who don’t think exactly the way you do.
Several of my best friends here in Detroit grew up in Hamtramck and their grandparents, while having lived here most of their lives, chose not to learn English and instead spoke in Polish .......
I find it disconcerting the numbers of so called "conservatives" who continue to demean and look down on immigrants who came to this country and built a life for themselves and their families simply because they don't communicate in a manner these bigots demand..........
No, what's obvious is your dislike for anyone who doesn't look like you or speak like you..........That's called bigotry..........
I don't think it was a choice. There was no time to do it. Andy Grove learned English from scratch and became CEO of Intel. But the guy's a flipping genius. Lucky Luciano learned English. But he was a gangster who arrived at age 10. Gangsters have a ton of free time in between strong arming people for "protection" money.
Pigs have no Right to abuse a citizen or a human or a dog.......gonna’ get pigs killed sooner or later.
Mrs. Pretti had a degree in pharmacy in Poland but couldn't become licensed here in the U.S. so she went to Wayne State and got a degree in chemistry and went to work for Michigan Bell in their R&D dept. She spoke broken English.....
Her husband, Mr. Pretti, had no education and found work with a nursery until he got a job with GM where he worked until he retired. While he could understand English, he couldn't speak it, which is typical of many immigrants from that era. Whenever they asked me to help them with things around their house, it was always Mrs. Pretti who spoke for them.........
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