Police in a Detroit suburb yanked a cop off the street after he reportedly told a mentally ill black man to sing and dance so he could record humiliating videos.
The Grosse Pointe Park police officer has admitted making several videos that sparked public outrage and accusations of racist abuse, according to the Motor City Muckraker, the news blog that first posted the footage.
A middle-aged black man sings and makes strange noises, apparently at the direction of a police officer, the grainy footage shows.
“Go ahead, do your song,” the person behind the camera says on the video.
Bowens didn’t name the suspended cop, but Muckraker had previously identified him as Officer Michael Njam.
Michael Scipio, 55, of Detroit claims he is the man in the officer’s video, the Detroit News reported.
Scipio lives in a boarding house in Detroit, just beyond the Grosse Pointe city line. Officers patrolling the small, primarily white enclave have frequently stopped him for public intoxication, and they have also driven him home and to the hospital, the paper reported.
“I don’t know who did it,” Scipio told reporters when asked about the video. “It made me feel like a fool.”
Steve Neavling, who broke the story on Muckraker, claimed the videos were just a sampling of the humiliating footage that was passed among officers and relatives to make fun of black men.
He also posted a picture — attributed to an officer — of a black man riding in the back of a trailer.
Neavling told the Free Press he would turn over additional videos to police once he had permission from his source.
Michigan activists have called for all officers involved to be fired.
“What kind of fun is it to take advantage of someone?” Minister Malik Shabazz of the Marcus Garvey Movement told the Detroit News. “It’s humiliating.”
The city says the investigation is ongoing.
"The people responsible for this video, and for the circumstances surrounding this video, will be disciplined accordingly," Bowens told Fox Detroit. "If there's anybody out there who has a video of anybody being mistreated in this fashion, that's not already posted out there, or just has it, we want them to contact the police chief."