NYPD body cam footage released in excessive force case
A Brooklyn man is suing the NYPD over a traffic stop for speeding that left him bleeding profusely from his face, according to cellphone and police body camera video footage released Monday.
Ricardo Mendoza was driving his father and two teenage passengers on April 27, 2018, when cops from the 79th Precinct pulled him over at a red light on Flushing Avenue and Nostrand Avenue at the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg border, according to the lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
"We're jumping on f-cking everybody right now. Everybody go to one f-cking car," says Officer Julio Ramos to the other cops, according to body camera video released by Mendoza's lawyers Monday. "Guns out. F-ck that," Ramos says before getting out of the police car. The other officers named in the lawsuit are Joseph Ardolino and Joseph Scaglione.
In the body camera video, Ramos walks over to the white BMW that Mendoza is driving.
"You got your gun out for what?" Mendoza asks Ramos when the officer tells him to get out of the car. Officers repeatedly tell Mendoza to get out of the vehicle, and he tells them not to touch him and asks why he is being pulled over.
When Mendoza, then 21, first asks what he was doing to warrant being pulled over, Ramos asks, "How fast do you think you were going?"
At one point in the video, when a female passenger in the back seat asks why Ramos has his gun out, the officer responds, "I don't know what you're doing, you're doing like 90 miles per hour."
Another cop then radios for backup.
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