In the caption of the Instagram post, he wrote, “An old white woman got on the train and immediately pointed at me and told me to correct how I was sitting. I refused, so she went to the conductor and complained. The conductor called the police and stopped the train,” he said.
O’Keefe also says in the caption that the friend of the woman who called the police had said to him, “You’re not the minority anymore.”
A separate video about the incident has been uploaded by the user, Nalae, on TikTok, where it has quickly gone viral, having been viewed over 160,000 times as of reporting.
They said I was disturbing the peace by not leaving the train. They pulled me off the train and arrested me without even talking to the Karen who reported the one black person on the train. On the platform, the police detained me and interrogated me. Only black folks stayed nearby and recorded the arrest. When I demanded a lawyer and reminded them they didn’t even take a statement from the woman who complained they eventually released me. This country is growing more psycho by the day. What will you do about it?"
Drunk and Disorderly conduct is a crime. I didn’t say cops can’t be called - I said unless they are arresting you to charge you with a crime they shouldn’t be able to detain you, remove you from a train, or claim you are resisting. This ensures they are only intervening when an actual crime was committed. It puts them in a position to have to defend their initial arrest in court and not just harass people and get away with it because they didn’t technically arrest them - which is the case here. Assuming from your statement you aren’t from America so you don’t know how much police harass people outside of actual arrests here. They will ask you to comply without an arrest to whatever unreasonable demand they make. Then, if you don’t comply with something unreasonable, they will claim you were resisting, and then charge you with resisting. It’s designed to create a charge where there was none to begin with. Police do that all the time over here, especially to minorities.
Not what happened here though. He was taken off the train, released and told to get the next train.
Also, the video shows them saying “stop resisting.” They were attempting to do just what I said, but a lot of people started recording, and this guy started saying how famous he was so the police thought better of it. Without the bystander cameras and the fame of the person involved it likely would’ve been handled much different.
What exactly was the reasoning for taking him off the train that justifies it? Because an old woman didn’t like the way he was sitting? That is the only justification listed anywhere. Is that the only standard necessary to remove this man from his paid for train ride, not to mention police harassing him? Why is his much greater discomfort less important than that ladies? Why does that random old lady get to dictate anything? Why does the train conductor have no responsibility to this other paid customer - he just stops the train due to this old ladies discomfort that has no legal backing? I just can’t see a justification for the way this situation was handled.
That’s what they’re saying. They’re saying that the police should need more than just the bare minimum investigation of a potential crime to remove you from transit. You’re saying that he was released as if the only two options were not taking him off the train and jailing him indefinitely.