|
 Blake, who is black, was surrounded by six plainclothes officers
outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel on Wednesday while waiting for a
car to take him to the U.S. Tennis Open. One of the officers slammed
the 35-year-old man to the ground before handcuffing him.
The incident involving a well-known athlete revived questions over
excessive police force that reverberated around the country after a
series of police killings of unarmed black men that sparked
sometimes violent protests.
"I spoke to Mr. Blake a short time ago and personally apologized for
yesterday's incident," Bratton said in a statement. "Mr. Blake
indicated he would be willing to meet with the Internal Affairs
Bureau as our investigation continues."
Bratton earlier told reporters the officer who tackled Blake had
been put on desk duty while the department reviewed the incident.
"I have concerns about the takedown," said Bratton, adding he had
seen a video of the arrest.
"The concern we had: Was the force used appropriate, and the initial
review - we believe it may not have been," added Bratton, who was
appointed by Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio at a time when he was
trying to improve relations between police and minority residents of
the city.
Police said Blake, at one time ranked fourth in the world, had been
mistakenly identified by a cooperating witness as a suspect in a
fraud ring.
Bratton said he was also concerned that no report had been made of
Blake's arrest and detention, which became public after the former
player reported it to the New York Daily News.
Blake told ABC's "Good Morning America" he decided to go public with
the incident after discussing it with his wife and imagining how he
would have felt if she had been treated in that way.
"I was furious because I thought about what I would be thinking if
someone did that to my wife, if someone tackled her in broad
daylight, paraded her around in a busy, crowded sidewalk in New York
City with handcuffs," Blake said.
'100 PERCENT COOPERATE'
Blake added that he had cooperated throughout the incident with the
officers, who did not immediately identify themselves as law
enforcement.
"The first words out of my mouth were, 'I'm going to 100 percent
cooperate. I don't want any incident or whatever,' just out of
reaction from what I've seen in the media,'" said Blake, who was on
his way on Wednesday to the U.S. Open, which is being played at
Flushing Meadows in the borough of Queens.
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Bratton said Blake had been mistakenly identified as a suspect by a
witness, adding he did not believe race influenced how he was
treated by white officers.
"This rush to put a race tag on it, I'm sorry, that's not involved
in this incident at all," Bratton told reporters. "That doesn't
denote there's a racial angle to this at all."
The police department last year promised to revamp how it trained
officers after 43-year-old Eric Garner died after being placed in a
chokehold by officers who were trying to arrest him for suspected
illegal cigarette sales on Staten Island in July 2014.
Garner's death was one of a string of cases in the past year
involving the deaths of black men in confrontations with police -
including in Baltimore, Cleveland and Ferguson, Missouri - that
sparked a national debate over race and justice.
Federal data show that U.S. police routinely use force when making
stops of pedestrians, doing so in one out of every four non-traffic
stops, according to a 2013 Justice Department report.
Some 57 percent of black respondents in a Pew Research Center poll
last year said police do a poor job of using the right amount of
force when they respond to situations, more than double the 22
percent of white respondents who reported that view.
That poll, of 1,501 U.S. adults, including 1,082 white adults and
153 black adults, was conducted in August 2014, days after the fatal
police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The margin
of error for white respondents was 3.4 percentage points and for
black respondents 9.1 percentage points.
(Reporting by Scott Malone in Boston; Additional reporting by Katie
Reilly in New York; Editing by Frances Kerry and Jonathan Oatis)
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