Videos of water being dumped on NYPD officers create stir

New York — Cellphone videos of people brazenly dousing uniformed New York Police Department patrolmen with water have sparked outrage and led police officials to urge the force not to tolerate the behavior.

Police on Tuesday were looking into two recent instances captured on video clips widely circulated on social media that show four on-duty officers — all sent to break up unruly gatherings around open fire hydrants during a recent heat wave — getting soaked themselves as onlookers jeer.

In one of the videos, an officer making an arrest of a suspect in Harlem appears to get hit in the head with a red plastic bucket as he and his partner are splashed with water. The other shows two officers getting repeatedly doused as they walk down a Brooklyn street looking sheepish as a woman’s voice in the background is heard saying, “Oh, they violated them.”

At a police event Tuesday, NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan said the department wants to make arrests in both cases but drew a sharp distinction between them. He described one as a potential assault on an officer doing his duty and the other a failure of officers to respond to a clear provocation.

In Brooklyn, “Someone thought it was all right and take a bucket of water and toss it over a cop’s head,” Monahan said. “That’s not all right. Any cop who thinks that’s all right, that they can walk away from something like that, maybe should consider whether or not that this is the profession for them.”

The appearance that the pranksters on both videos showed little fear of reprisal fueled accusations against Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio and other liberal politicians that their police reform policies have fostered a climate of disrespect for officers on the beat.