A New York Police Department officer threw a man out of the subway station because the man asked the officer and his partner to mask up, a viral video shows.
Andrew Gilbert, 27, said the incident took place on Tuesday on his way to work.
“When I got off the train, I noticed these two officers standing there on the platform with no masks, as is fairly typical these days for the NYPD,” Gilbert told the Daily Dot. “So I walked over and asked them why they weren’t masked.”
Gilbert said the male officer pretended he couldn’t hear Gilbert and taunted him by saying that he couldn’t “hear you through your mask.”
Gilbert said he was filming the officer, and another passenger joined him in filming the incident in a video that has now been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
Gilbert said he insisted the officers put on the mask as they are mandated to do in New York on the subway, and the officer called him “disruptive.”
“[He] grabbed me and shoved me [around] 60 feet over to the emergency exit and slammed me through it,” he added.
The video shows the officer grabbing Gilbert through his T-shirt collar and dragging him across the platform toward the emergency exit. A female officer accompanies him and doesn’t say anything.
She helps the officer open the emergency exit, and he shoves Gilbert through to the other side.
From the other side of the door, Gilbert repeatedly asked the officer to share his badge number, he told the Daily Dot.
“He yelled at me, ‘If you’re not going to ride the train you can leave!’” he added.
The officers then walk away from the door and onto the platform where they stand as the video ends.
The incident only fueled what was an already brewing frustration with NYPD over officers’ violence on regular commuters and, at times, low-income food stand workers.
“They all have attitude/issues, you can’t approach them [with] any questions,” one user tweeted in response to the video. “I do NOT see any cop ever on the train and they look totally not interested to help people [with] safety … I don’t trust them sorry.”
Many were frustrated that the incident was another example of police officers feeling that they were above the law.
On Wednesday, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea identified the officer as a patrol officer and said his actions were “absolutely inexcusable.”
“Nobody is getting fired over this incident, nobody is getting suspended over this incident,” he said when a reporter asked what kind of disciplinary actions might be taken against the officer.
MTA Acting Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said in response to an AM New York Metro journalist that it’s disappointing to see NYPD officers not following the mask mandate.
“We want people to feel safe. We want them to feel COVID safe in the system, and because of that we are complying with the federal rule about masking on transit, and it’s really undermining that sense of, compliance that we have, obviously, more than a few cops who are not complying,” he said.
“We count on our law enforcement officers to set an example, they got to do it, and frankly the city’s recovery is counting on people being able to be safe on mass transit,” he added, according to his response shared with the Daily Dot by the MTA.
“It’s up to the NYPD how to address allegations that its officers have violated rules,” Tim Minton, MTA Communications Director said in a statement shared with the Daily Dot on Wednesday.
“We shouldn’t be worrying about this type of stuff when the focus ought to be on bringing people back so that normal life and the business of the city can resume,” Lieber added.
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