The images that emerged of
Jah-miel Cuffee's arrest shows him pinned on the pavement by other officers
By Matthew Chayes
NEW YORK — The family of a man
who died after a violent encounter with the NYPD on Staten Island, joined by
another man shown on an amateur cellphone video getting stomped on the head
during an arrest in Brooklyn, appeared at a rally Saturday led by the Rev. Al
Sharpton demanding action against police brutality.
The images that emerged of Jah-miel
Cuffee's arrest shows him pinned on the pavement by other officers when the
accused officer approaches and lowers his foot on Cuffee's head. He was
suspected of smoking a marijuana cigarette, police said.
A week earlier, Sharpton
preached from the same pulpit at his Harlem headquarters over the July 17 death
of Eric Garner, 43, an accused peddler of untaxed cigarettes in Staten Island
on whom cops applied a banned chokehold. That incident also was caught on
amateur video.
Sharpton said he watched the video
of Cuffee's Wednesday arrest after returning Friday from a meeting with federal
prosecutors to ask that they, instead of the local district attorney, consider
prosecuting the chokehold officer.
"It was almost like, 'Here
we go again,' " Sharpton said.
Sharpton suggested he wants to
see Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration roll back the so-called
"broken-windows theory" of policing — championed by Police
Commissioner William Bratton — in which officers focus on small offenses to
deter bigger crimes.
"The challenge for this
mayor is that you ran on transforming the Police Department," Sharpton
said. "You have the opportunity now to show you said what you meant and
you meant what you said."
Esaw Garner, the dead man's
widow, said she wanted the officers involved in his arrest to be arrested.
"He was a quiet man, but he's making a lot of noise now," she said.
Cuffee, 32, who has been
charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and evidence tampering, had a
bruise on his forehead that he says was sustained in the stomp.
"I just want it all to
stop. I just want justice," he said.
Cuffee's sister, Rashida Rahim,
said her brother was defenseless. "This has to stop," said Rahim, 39,
of Englewood, New Jersey. "We need to have justice."
Both officers — Joel Edouard in
the Cuffee case and Daniel Pantaleo in the Garner case -- have been stripped of
their badges and guns and put on desk duty, the NYPD said.
The officers' union president
said videos "present an isolated period of a police interaction but never
the entire scenario."
Also attending Sharpton's rally
Saturday was Nicole Bell, whose fiance, Sean Bell, was unarmed when he was shot
dead by undercover police officers who fired 50 shots outside of a Jamaica,
Queens, strip club in 2006. Bell said she felt a kinship with the Garners —
"like looking in a mirror."
Sharpton said he and the Garner
family are scheduled to meet Monday with Staten Island District Attorney Daniel
Donovan Jr. With Robert Brodsky
