By Josh Saul
Two Brooklyn cops sideswiped a parked
SUV, then arrested a man sitting in the passenger seat of the vehicle, accusing
him of damaging their car, a suit charges.
And the officers would have gotten away
with their lie — had the whole bizarre drama not been caught by a security
camera.
Robert Jackson, 31, told The Post his
nightmare began when a police car heading the wrong way on one-way Watkins
Street in Brownsville scraped against a parked Ford Explorer, which belongs to
his girlfriend.
Jackson, a maintenance worker, said he
was sitting in the legally parked car outside of his apartment when the
accident happened. He got out of the vehicle and walked up to the officers.
“I was smiling, like, ‘How’d you run
into me?’ ” he recalled. “Then the cop said, ‘Dude, you ran into me.’ ”
“I just wanted them to fix the damage
and apologize, but it didn’t turn out that way,” Jackson said. “They were
trying to cover it up.”
At that point, things got even more
surreal.
The two cops checked the block for
surveillance cameras before arresting him for destruction of city property,
according to the lawsuit filed by Jackson in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
“When they thought no cameras were on.
I saw their gloves go on, and that’s when I was arrested,” Jackson said.
But fortunately for Jackson, the
officers, Christopher Oliver and Shazad Shigri, missed one camera on the home
of one of his neighbors, Jackson said.
The video, reviewed by The Post,
corroborates Jackson’s story.
It shows the police car going the wrong
way down the street on April 17, 2013, and scraping the parked SUV as the
officers try to make room for a truck to pass.
Though charges were eventually dropped,
Jackson had to spend a night in a “filthy, overpopulated, rat- and rodent-infested
cell,” his suit says.
“The officer who arrested me said if I
took care of the expense on my vehicle, they would take care of their vehicle
and I wouldn’t have gotten arrested,” Jackson recounted. “He knew he was
wrong.”
The NYPD referred comment to the city
Law Department.
The city Law Department said only, “We
will review the complaint.”
The suit charges that the officers
“falsely claimed that [Jackson] was operating the parked motor vehicle and that
[Jackson] caused the parked motor vehicle to strike the NYPD vehicle.”
Jackson was arrested for destruction of
city property, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, the suit states.
But he was officially charged only with
unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle because he had a suspended license.
The criminal complaint drafted against
Jackson says he had the keys in the ignition — which could support the
unlicensed-operator charge — when the crash happened, but Jackson said that’s
not true.
“If he’s claiming that he was not in
the driver’s seat and the car was not on — if either of those claims are
truthful, then he wasn’t operating the car under the law,” said Todd Greenberg,
a defense attorney and expert on traffic law who is not involved in the case.
The suit, which names the city and the
two police officers, seeks unspecified monetary damages.
