A 22-year-old named Yibin Mu was violent arrested on Sunday evening for allegedly ignoring the numerous signs in Manhattan's Columbus Circle that ban skateboarding there. In a video Mu posted to YouTube, a police officer appears to tackle him and possibly employ a chokehold—a controversial tactic prohibited by the New York City Police Department and decried by police reform activists.
"Someone record!" Mu can be heard yelling in the video as the cop sits on his back. "Someone record this!" The officer eventually deploys pepper spray.
What's tricky to decipher here is whether the maneuver the cop used on Mu technically qualifies as a chokehold. An NYPD spokesman told VICE News that Mu refused to comply with the officer's request to sit down so he could issue a summons, and that Mu also refused to put his hands behind his back, prompting the struggle. The spokesman declined to comment about whether the move used by the officer was a chokehold, but did indicate that Internal Affairs is looking into the matter.
"I would say this was a headlock and not a chokehold," says Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD Detective Sergeant and law enforcement expert at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. "The reason I say this is that the maneuver does not go around the debt of the neck which would obstruct breathing."
Chokeholds were banned in 1993 by then-Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, but the death of Eric Garner at the hands of officer Daniel Pantaleo last year put chokeholds at the forefront of a public debate. A deep dive into ten chokehold cases released in January by the city's NYPD Inspector General showed that Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) and Internal Affairs Bureau often lost track of complaints, and that typically nothing came of them. Adding to the confusion, the 45-page report also found that NYPD's various internal agencies had difficulty agreeing on what constituted an illegal chokehold.
Earlier this year, city council members floated passing a law to explicitly make chokeholds illegal—rather than just prohibited under departmental policy—but ran into opposition from Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton.
Mu did not respond to request for comment from VICE, but was charged with resisting arrest and violating park regulations, among other offenses.
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