A Brooklyn man claims that two cops hit his parked car, then blamed him for the crash. Robert Jackson, 31, is suing the NYPD after officers Christopher Oliver and Shazad Shigri allegedly sideswiped his parked SUV outside his Brownsville home in April 2013, checked the neighborhood for surveillance cameras, then arrested him: "I thought it was a joke," Jackson told the News. "The cop said, 'Dude, you ran into me.'"
Jackson, who works as a porter, said he was waiting for his girlfriend in the car when the cops drove the wrong way down a one-way street; when a truck came down the block, the cop car backed up, damaging its bumper and hitting the SUV. Then the cops allegedly checked for cameras around the block: "When they thought no cameras were on. I saw their gloves go on, and that's when I was arrested," Jackson told the Post.
Jackson was arrested for destruction of city property, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, though he was ultimately only charged with unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle because he had a suspended license. Oliver wrote in the criminal complaint that he "went to the driver's side door of defendant's vehicle and observed the door open and the keys in the ignition," something which Jackson insists is a lie.
It turned out there was one surveillance camera the cops missed; the News reviewed the video, and said it shows that Jackson "immediately shut the door upon exiting the car and that the cop never went near the driver's side as he claimed." Jackson had to spend a night in a "filthy, overpopulated, rat- and rodent-infested cell."
"I just wanted them to fix the damage and apologize, but it didn't turn out that way," Jackson added. "They were trying to cover it up."
