Cops Beat Crap Out of Rutgers Students
by Steven D
Sat Feb 12th, 2011 at 11:05:47 PM EST
Imagine this. You are asleep in a basement apartment with your roommate. You are both Rutgers students. One of you is white, the other an Arab American, and you are both 19. One of you has a father who was a cop. Police in New Brunswick, NJ have a warrant for a different student living in a different apartment in the same building. You have no police record. You are not identified on the warrant. It's 4:30 in the morning. Guess what happened next:
Two Rutgers roommates say they were sleeping in the early morning hours of December 10th and had no idea who was barging into the basement room they share in an off-campus house in New Brunswick.
"I got hit in the face; I got hit in the ribs. That's basically what happened," said Kareem Najjar, a Rutgers University student.
"I remember basically waking up to being hit, on the side of my face, on my back I got kicked a couple of times and stepped on," Kostman said.
Pictures show boot marks left on Kostman's back.
"One person was standing on my back another was standing on my head," Najjar said.
"It's really scary, really intimidating when there are people just yelling at your and hitting you, you don't believe that it's something that cops would do," Kostman said.
The roommates say it wasn't until they were handcuffed that they were told this was a raid by New Brunswick Police who apparently had a warrant for someone else in the house.
Note these kids were not formally arrested or charged with any crime. They were, however forced to sit in the underwear while handcuffed in freezing temperatures. In short they got the s**t beat out of them because the police were looking for other alleged criminals. They weren't even told they had been assaulted and "detained" by the cops until after they were handcuffed. Their room was trashed by the cops even though the police had no warrant to search their apartment.
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Hard to respect cops who act like criminals and don't even identify themselves when they break into your apartment to beat you up for no reason I can see other other than a desire to beat young helpless kids up.
Imagine, however, if one of these kids had a permit for a gun. Imagine if he had tried to defend himself against what he could reasonably assume were burglars (remember they did not identify themselves as as police and were dressed in plain clothes) intent on causing grievous bodily harm or death to the two students. We'd be talking about two dead Rutgers Sophomores today, and the New Brunswick Police would no doubt be whitewashing the incident to smear the victims.more...
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2011/2/12/23547/1136