NYPD Cop Charged for Attacking 2 Handcuffed Black Men in Separate Incidents, Punching 1 in the face While in a cell and Kneeling on the Back of Another who was shouting “I can’t breathe”

From [HERE] A New York police sergeant was charged on Thursday with attacking two handcuffed suspects in separate arrests, punching one in the face when he was in a cell and kneeling on the back of another who was shouting “I can’t breathe” from a subway station floor.

Authorities claim the sergeant, Phillip Wong, acted after being spit at in one instance and taunted with anti-Asian slurs in the other. But the provocations did not justify his responses, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said.

“When N.Y.P.D. officers head into the field each day to face unknown and potentially life-threatening situations, they do one of the most difficult jobs in the world,” Mr. Vance said in a statement. “But having sworn an oath to protect and serve their communities, those difficult jobs need to be carried out with the utmost integrity and professionalism.”

That was especially true, he added, for officers in supervisory roles. “This sergeant grossly violated his training — and the law — during the arrests of these two individuals, whose conduct did not justify these violent responses,” he said.

In a brief court appearance on Thursday afternoon, Sergeant Wong, in handcuffs, pleaded not guilty to third-degree assault and attempted third-degree assault, both misdemeanors.

Police Department guidelines have long prohibited officers from using chokeholds, including “any pressure to the throat or windpipe, which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air,” except in extremely limited circumstances, and they are trained not to sit, kneel or stand on people’s heads, backs or chests.

The department’s rules also forbid officers from using force as retaliation and against handcuffed detainees, except to prevent injury, stop an escape or overpower someone who is resisting.

The rules have not kept New York officers from employing the banned practices. The charges against Sergeant Wong, 37, were announced a day after it emerged that the city had agreed to pay $575,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a man who said an officer had put him in a chokehold and shot him 13 times with a Taser over a suspected noise violation.

The district attorney’s office gave the following account of the arrests that prompted the charges against Sergeant Wong, a 15-year department veteran who has been suspended without pay.

In the first, in October 2019, he was among a group of officers who took a 48-year-old man and two other people to a Harlem precinct for arrest processing. Once there, he and two other officers put the man, who was handcuffed, into a holding cell.

As the officers closed the cell door, the man kicked it and began to spit at them. Sergeant Wong pushed past the two other officers, opened the door and punched the man in the face. The man was taken to a hospital, where he got stitches for a cut above his right eye.

The second arrest occurred at the subway station at Broadway and West 96th Street in April 2020. An officer there under Sergeant Wong’s supervision arrested a 35-year-old man after seeing him punch someone on an arriving train.

As officers led the man out of the station, he yelled obscenities and anti-Asian slurs at Sergeant Wong, and then kicked him in the leg. Sergeant Wong and a second officer took the man, his hands cuffed behind him, to the ground, with the man on his stomach and Sergeant Wong kneeling on his back.

They claim the man continued to taunt Sergeant Wong, and then shouted, “I can’t breathe.”

Sergeant Wong, using an obscenity for emphasis, responded that he did not care “if you can breathe or not” and punched the man in the side of his face. He then placed both of his knees on the man’s back and bounced on him repeatedly.

The man was taken to a hospital, where staff members determined that he had not sustained any injuries.

An assistant district attorney, Carolina Nevin, told Judge Curtis Farber of State Supreme Court on Thursday that Sergeant Wong’s supervisor had reported the 2019 episode to the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.

The Legal Aid Society said it was representing the man involved in one of the arrests, but declined to provide further details. Jennvine Wong, a Legal Aid staff attorney, called the charges against Sergeant Wong “a step in the right direction.”

“But it is merely one case in many where police officers believe they are above the law,” she said. “For too long, officers have gotten away with brutally assaulting our clients, lying on the witness stand, planting evidence and other egregious acts of misconduct.”