A police officer shown on a YouTube video berating and roughly handling a skateboarder at the Inner Harbor was suspended on Monday.
The incident involving Officer Salvatore Rivieri, a 17-year-old veteran, is the subject of an internal affairs investigation, said Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department and the mayor’s office.
“The entire incident raised red flags for all of the members of the command staff who watched the video,” Clifford told The (Baltimore) Sun.
The video, apparently shot last summer, shows Rivieri putting the youth, 14-year-old Eric Bush, into a headlock and pushing him to the ground.
“He was just, like, getting an attitude with me, and said he was going to slap me upside down my face, and I was just going on with it and then he tackled me,” Bush told WJZ-TV.
At one point on the video, Rivieri said, “Obviously, your parents don’t put a foot in your butt quite enough, because you don’t understand the meaning of respect. First of all, you better learn how to speak. I’m not ‘man.’ I’m not ‘dude,’ I am Officer Rivieri.”
Rivieri told The Sun on Sunday that he did not know that the incident had been recorded or posted on the Internet. He acknowledged having encounters with skateboarders at the Inner Harbor, where skateboarding is banned, last summer, and told a reporter that he would watch the video on YouTube.
After he was suspended on Monday, Rivieri said, “I have no comment. Thank you.”
Clifford said Monday afternoon that Mayor Sheila Dixon had not seen the video, but that its contents had been described to her and that she was “very displeased.”
“We have invested a lot of time and energy in having better relations between the community and the police,” Clifford said. “The bad behavior of one police officer can jeopardize a lot of hard work.”
Paul Blair, head of the police union, had not seen the video but warned that videos show only part of a story. He said that it is impossible to know what happened before or after the camera was turned on.
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