Levar McDonald, also known as the as web comedian and rapper The Levar Show, was arrested in the Brooklyn Bridge Park in an escalating series of events that ended with him on the ground under a pile of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers.
Bystander video footage of part of the encounter shows a police officer standing close to McDonald and demanding to see McDonald’s ID, to which McDonald repeatedly responds, level-voiced, “don’t put your hands on me,” and says, “I’m not doing nothing wrong.” McDonald tells an agitated crowd that he left the park when an officer told him to.
More officers arrive and surround McDonald, and around 1:20 the encounter drastically escalates — officers reach for McDonald, who appears to move his hands out of the way, and then three NYPD officers move in on McDonald while one takes him down by the neck. McDonald flails on the ground, and one of the officers punches him.
An NYPD spokesman told Gothamist, who first picked up the story, that McDonald was told to leave the park at around 10:25 p.m., and that he refused to leave the park and to produce ID.
“He refused to produce ID and started yelling and screaming, and a crowd gathered around him,” the spokesman said. “They told him to leave the park for whatever reason, and then he refused to comply there, and obviously it went to the next level.”
In the video footage, McDonald never raises his voice.
According to Gothamist, McDonald was charged with disobeying a park sign, resisting an arrest, and disorderly conduct, and released without bail the next day.
However, unless there’s an outstanding arrest warrant, disobeying a park sign is a violation and punishable by a summons, not an arrest, and it’s unclear what sign McDonald was violating or why the police told him to leave the park: The Brooklyn Bridge Park doesn’t close until 1 a.m. Refusing to produce an ID alone is not grounds for arrest or obstruction charges.
In a blog post, rapper I.O.D. writes that the police had been following Levar for 40 minutes before the encounter, and that the group had been kicked out of the park by park police for “no given reason” when the NYPD car rolled up. He says that he believes the group was racially profiled and targeted for being black in public.
“Just a bunch of black teens and young adults looking to have fun on a Monday evening. Our only desire was to get out of the house and do something inspiring with life, but it feels like every single time there’s too much melanin in one space there are cops not too far behind.”
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton recently called rappers “thugs” in response to a shooting at a T.I. concert, relying on coded language and racist stereotypes associating all black men with violence and crime.
The area neighboring Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn Heights, is largely white and affluent, according to Gothamist. Residents have expressed concern about security at the park, which is a gathering place for mostly black and Hispanic youth. The Bridge itself was also a central point of tension during protests over a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner. Thousands of people gathered on the bridge, and clashes between protesters and the police resulted in arrests.