BRUTALITY!
Clueless cops roughed me up: blind vet’s suit
CLAUDE RUFFIN is blind — and apparently so were cops who never identified themselves when they wrestled him the ground.
Ruffin, a 62-year-old disabled veteran who hasn’t been able to see since 2001, was celebrating New Year’s Eve inside a Long Island City, Queens, shelter in 2014 when security called police claiming that he had kicked a door.
The officers went to Ruffin’s room inside the Borden Avenue Veterans Residence and found him sitting on his bed, wearing his dark-colored glasses.
“I’m not expecting for police to come,” the Mississippi native told the Daily News. “Two people grab my arms. But I was cool. I walked outside with them, but then they began to manhandle me!”
Ruffin said he pulled his arm away from one cop, sparking a fight.
As the former plumber wrestled on the ground with his captors, he still didn’t know they were cops.
“I went to get up and I put my hand on one of their guns,” Ruffin said. “I said, ‘Oh, this is the f---ing police!’”
“They should have identified themselves,” he said. “The least they could have done was that.”
Ruffin was charged with resisting arrest and assault on a police officer. Two other shelter residents, Shabazz Ali and Henry Davis, were also arrested as they ran to Ruffin’s aid, according to a lawsuit filed last month. Davis was pepper-sprayed and nearly shocked with a stun gun as he struggled with officers.
“We kept yelling, ‘You’re dealing with a blind man! You’re dealing with a blind man!’” Ali recalled.
“No one said ‘I’m the police,’” Shabazz said. “This was right after that (Akai Gurley) shooting in the hallway. A few months earlier (Eric Garner) was choked to death over cigarettes. With all of that in the news you would think they would give people some kind of courtesy, particularly a blind man.”
The charges against Ruffin were ultimately dismissed. Shelter workers admitted he never kicked the door, but bumped into it because he was walking around without his cane.
But, with the charges hanging over his head, Ruffin was unable to secure permanent housing, attorney David Thompson of Stecklow & Thompson said.
“(Police) have to identify themselves and they have to do it in a way a blind person can trust,” Thompson said.
He filed a suit claiming the city “has failed to provide any written guidelines to police officers for proper interactions with blind people.”
“The NYPD Patrol Guide, which is approximately 2,000 pages, mentions blind people only once,” the lawsuit reads. “It states that police should not take enforcement action against a blind person for violation of the Canine Waste Law.’”
The NYPD would not comment on the case or answer questions about how police deal with the visually impaired, citing the ongoing lawsuit.
A police source with knowledge of the case said Ruffin was intoxicated and was throwing police officers around. A woman cop was seriously injured and was hospitalized, the source said.
The city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board reviewed the case and exonerated the officers, according to the source, but the agency wouldn’t confirm the finding Friday.