BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Two Buffalo police officers were charged with assault Saturday, prosecutors said, after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old protester in recent demonstrations over the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.
Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, who surrendered Saturday morning, pleaded not guilty to second-degree assault. They were released without bail.
At a news conference Saturday, District Attorney John Flynn said the officers “crossed a line.”
The officers had been suspended without pay Friday after a TV crew captured the confrontation the night near the end of protests.
The footage shows a man identified as Martin Gugino approaching a line of helmeted officers holding batons as they clear demonstrators from Niagara Square around the time of an 8 p.m. curfew.
Two officers push Gugino backward, and he hits his head on the pavement. Blood spills as officers walk past. One officer leans down to check on the injured man before another officer urges the colleague to keep walking.
The video of the encounter sparked outrage online as demonstrators take to cities across the country to protest Floyd’s death.
“I think there was criminal liability from what I saw on the video,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a briefing Saturday. “I think what the mayor did and the district attorney did was right, and I applaud them for acting as quickly as they did.”
“What we saw was horrendous and disgusting, and I believe, illegal,” he added.
But dozens of Buffalo police officers who were angered over their fellow officers’ suspensions stepped down from the department’s crowd control unit Friday. The resigning officers did not leave their jobs altogether.
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That protester, it turns out, was a longtime follower of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. He was a veteran of many protests, since injustice and violence seem to be constants in the modern nation state. I am sure the assault did not surprise him, but what an irony…having violence done to you as you are advocating for peace and justice…
Shame – shame on them all!
More than a dozen of them witnessed the assault without offering any aid to a severely-injured septuagenarian bleeding out in front of them.
Whom were they “serving”? Whom were they “protecting”?
Every single one of them should spend the rest of their careers as meter maids, or on canine-scoop patrol – if not charged, themselves, as accessories after the fact.
Because constantly gunning for Medicare and Social Security weren’t “hands on” enough.
This is what can happen when you start shoving people around like a tough guy. When I was a kid two guys got in an argument in a bar in my hometown, they step outside, one hits the other who falls backward, hits his head, and dies. So suddenly you’re not just a loudmouth any more, you’re a defendant in a homicide. I hope this man recovers but he may not. It’s different from TV, you dumb bastards.