The black teenager who was pinned to the ground and handcuffed by two police officers at a New Jersey mall said Friday the cops made him feel “inferior” because they let a white teen he had been fighting with sit on a couch as they restrained him.
Speaking on CNN’s “New Day,” teen Z’Kye Husain said he was mad at the disparate treatment he and the white teen received by the cops.
“I felt like, inferior, like I was less important,” Husain, 14, told host John Berman.
“I was like mad. I was angry that they treated me differently,” he added.
Husain got into a fight Saturday at the Bridgewater Commons mall in Bridgewater after he confronted another teen, who is white, about trying to beat up a 7th grader.
As cellphone videos rolled, two Bridgewater Police officers broke up the fight by pulling the white teen off of Husain and ordering him onto a nearby couch.
The cops forcefully restrained Husain on the floor of the mall, pressing their knees onto his back as they handcuffed him, according to the footage and his interview on CNN.
Z’Kye Husain accused New Jersey police officers of treating him differently when he was restrained by them after fighting a white teenager. Sienna Freidinger via StoryfulHusain said in the interview that he learned of the different treatment after watching a viral video clip of the incident.
His family have hired civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who called on the police officers to be reprimanded and retrained.
“It is evident that officers immediately assumed that because of the color of Z’Kye’s skin, him acting nobly was not even in the realm of possibility,” Crump said.
Footage shows Husain confronting a white teenager before they got into a fight at the Bridgewater Commons in New Jersey. Sienna Freidinger via Storyful
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he was “deeply disturbed” by the alleged behavior of the Bridgewater Police officers. AP Photo/Seth Wenig“That video says it all,” he said of the incident, which is being probed by the police department with the help of the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office’s Internal Affairs Unit.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said in a statement that he was “deeply disturbed by what appears to be racially disparate treatment in this video.”
The Bridgewater Police have declined to comment about the incident.






