Mayor Bloomberg suggested Wednesday that the handcuffing of a city councilman and top city aide at the West Indian Parade was a "misunderstanding" that could be settled over a cold one.
"I assume it will probably turn out to be a misunderstanding," Bloomberg said, "but the police have a job to do and the city councilman has a job to do, and hopefully every once in a while if there's a misunderstanding they have a beer together and work it out."
But Jumaane Williams, the councilman arrested at the parade Monday, said the matter was "bigger than the three of us over a beer."
In a statement Wednesday, Williams said, "We would rather have a meeting with the mayor and Commissioner Kelly, where young African-American and Latino New Yorkers can talk openly and directly about their experiences with stop and frisk and other police interactions."
Bloomberg's comment evoked the moment when President Obama invited Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley to the White House for a beer after Gates was arrested at his own home in 2009.
Williams said Tuesday that he and the city aide, Kirsten J. Foy, were targeted and pushed around because they are black.
"If I did not look the way I look ... we are sure things would have been handled differently," the 35-year-old Williams, who wears his hair in long dreadlocks, said at a news conference on the steps of City Hall. "These things happen on a regular basis. If it happens to myself, an elected official ... please imagine what is happening to our young, black and Latino males every single day."
Williams and Foy, an aide to Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, said they had been trying to get to an official event near the parade on Monday and were allowed into a blocked off area by a police official.
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After passing another police checkpoint without a problem, officers stopped the two at a third checkpoint and seemed uninterested in the official identification that marked them as city officials, Williams said.
The councilman was repeatedly shoved, then handcuffed as he was speaking to a police chief on his cellphone, he said. Foy said that he was retreating from the scene at the request of an officer — backing up while attempting to explain who he was — when the officer told him, "It's over for you. You're done," then knocked him to the ground and pushed his face into the grass.
"If you're not under threat and you proceed to be aggressive, what kind of policing are you engaging in?" Foy said Tuesday.
Police have said Williams and Foy were stopped from entering a frozen zone near the Brooklyn Museum, where a crowd formed and someone punched a police captain.
The two were handcuffed, taken across the street, detained until their identities were established and then released, police said. Williams said he had seen no violence by civilians at the scene.
The NYPD did not respond to the allegation that the officers were motivated by race.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly would not comment Tuesday on what happened, but said internal affairs was investigating.
