NYPD officers caught in shocking VIDEO brutalizing unarmed black man for unspecified 'crime'

Shocking footage of a swarm of NYPD cops savagely beating an unarmed black man while arresting him for the 'crime' of asking why a plainclothes officer was detaining him has gone viral, epitomizing 'excessive force.'

The eyewitness video, viewed close to three million times since it was posted to Twitter late on Wednesday night, opens on a black man being held against a wall by an undercover cop. With his hands up and holding only a cellphone, he calmly asks what crime he's accused of committing (and if he's even being arrested), but his assailant refuses to answer his questions and calls for backup. Within seconds, close to a dozen uniformed cops converge on the quiet street, wrestle the man to the ground, and rain down kicks on him while he screams. They then manhandle him into cuffs.

(Warning: Contains scenes some may find disturbing)

Upon arriving on the scene, the officers seem to take no time to assess the situation, which was not then escalating into violence – the plainclothes officer is clearly not in danger, as his quarry is merely asking questions. Instead, the uniformed pack practically jumps into a melee – and the violence, particularly the man's screams, is difficult to watch.

After the cops have carried him away, moaning in pain, a few return to search the area, though it's not clear what they're looking for.

The Twitter user who posted the clip had little to offer in the way of context other than that the man was in a park near – but not after – closing time, and that the plainclothes cop refused to identify himself when asked.

Such videos have become depressingly common, a fact the poster addressed in another tweet in which she apologized for "triggering" her followers.

Some pointed out that if the witness hadn't been filming, things could have gotten much worse. The specter of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man choked to death by an NYPD officer in 2014 on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, loomed large over the scene.

Condemnation of the police was universal in the replies to the footage, though from different angles. There were calls for politicians to take a stand, for a wholesale retraining of the NYPD, and suggestions to sue or take the matter to Internal Affairs. Many sought to help the man, pointing out that without their assistance, he certainly wasn't going to get any justice from the legal system. Some just seemed resigned, attributing the beatdown to "walking while black."

Even a self-described former law enforcement officer was shocked by the footage, insisting there had to be more to the story – though they seemed more unsettled by the cops' behavior than anything else.

Racism in the NYPD has been back in the news recently due to the presidential run of former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg, who oversaw a massive expansion of the force's controversial "stop and frisk" policy and spoke approvingly of "throwing" black youths "up against the wall" and frisking them to get illegal guns off the street. At the policy's height, just over one percent of stops found an illegal weapon, and non-whites were vastly overrepresented among those stopped. While the policy has not been discontinued under Bloomberg's successor Bill de Blasio, it has been severely curtailed.

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