Two Brooklyn police officers were placed on modified duty after a viral video showed them beating a man inside a liquor store in Cobble Hill, and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Tuesday the episode is under internal review. The video captured the confrontation near Hoyt and Baltic Streets just before 4 p.m. on April 14, with plainclothes officers pummeling and wrestling with the man as bottles flew from shelves and blood spread across the floor.
Tisch said she had seen the video and had been briefed on it, calling it upsetting and saying the Internal Affairs Bureau was reviewing it. Sources with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office said on April 15 that the charges against the man had been dropped.
What made the footage travel so fast was not just the violence, but the setting. A liquor store in a quiet stretch of Cobble Hill became the center of a police encounter that, according to sources close to the investigation, grew out of an undercover buy-and-bust operation tied to community complaints about drug sales in the area. During the sting, police arrested Joshua Ramos for allegedly selling crack cocaine to an undercover officer. Ramos was allegedly seen handing the cash payment to another man who fled when officers moved in, and police then found a man matching that description inside the store across the street.
The scene inside the store was chaotic even by the standards of a street arrest. The video showed two officers in plain clothes beating and wrestling with the man while one officer told him, “You can’t resist arrest.” The man was later arrested and, sources familiar with the case said, charged with resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration before those charges were dropped a day later. That sequence leaves the NYPD with an ugly public-record problem: an operation that began as a drug-enforcement sting ended with officers on modified duty and a video that is now driving the investigation.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote on X that the violence used by NYPD officers in the video was extremely disturbing and unacceptable, saying officers should never treat a person that way. Activist Hawk Newsome called it a blatant violation of human rights and a disgusting display of force, and demanded that the detectives be identified and fired immediately. Abelee Moran, reacting to the scene, could be heard asking, “What’s your badge number?” and later said, “I want justice for this guy; I’ve never in my life witnessed something so horrific.”
The case now sits on two tracks: the internal review inside the police department and the dropped charges in court. For Tisch, the video is already a political and institutional liability, because it shows force that the public can see for itself, in a city where similar clashes between police tactics and public trust have become a recurring fight. That is the same backdrop that has put Mamdani at the center of other city debates, including his clashes with officials over budget and public space, as in the dispute around Julie Menin faces Mamdani attack over NYC budget and tax plan and the discussion around Mamdani unveils Grand Army Plaza redesign to widen space and curb danger. What happens next will depend on whether the review finds the officers crossed a line the video has already made hard to defend.