At least 10 NYPD officers swarmed a subway car in Brooklyn just before 1 a.m. on Monday, forcing a man and a woman from a 2 train in a chaotic search for a "man with a gun," according to videos, a witness, and an NYPD official. But the search—in which two people were forcibly removed from the train, seemingly without being told why—led to nothing but two summonses against the duo for "disorderly conduct."

In a video Crown Heights resident Neely Grobani posted on Twitter, both uniformed and plainclothes officers are seen taking a man and woman off the train—to screams of confusion from the apparent couple, who the man said had just finished a date.

Grobani had been on the train with the couple since Times Square-42nd Street station in Midtown without incident. When the train got to the Atlantic Avenue station, the train came to a standstill for several minutes, she said. Officers were running up and down the platform looking into each train car. (She at first wrote in a tweet the encounter happened at Eastern Parkway, but videos later confirmed she intended to say Atlantic Avenue.)

"They were peering into car after car," Grobani said. "It was clear they were looking for somebody or something. ... It was clear that they kind of like zoomed in on this guy."

An officer on the platform signaled to passengers to move out of the way through the glass, and soon after, cops ordered the man to stand up, according to videos provided by Grobani. Officers then detained the woman, forcing her onto the platform, while she demanded to know why they were taking him. Officers held the man and woman on the platform, several feet from each other, with hands behind their backs.

"Why are y'all not telling me what I did?" the man yelled in one of the videos. "Why are you searching me? I have nothing on me."

"Y'all stopped the whole f---ing train for this?" he said. "There's no weapon on me. ... What did I do wrong, sir? What are y'all not telling me, sir?" The man repeatedly asks why he's been stopped and what precinct the officers work.

The man, said Grobani, "kept asking over and over and over again."

"He was really upset," Grobani said. In a tweet, she later wrote: "This system is so broken."

NYPD spokesperson Mary Frances O'Donnell said the officers were responding to a 911 call about a "man with a gun on the 2 Line train at the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn."

The man they detained matched "the description provided by the 911 caller," she said.

"Believing the man had a gun, officers removed the male from the train," O'Donnell said. "This male was in the company of a woman who attempted to interfere with police operations and she was removed from the train as well." (Grobani says the woman had tried to follow the man she was with off the train.)

Both were slapped with disorderly conduct summonses and released at the subway station, according to O'Donnell. But after a search of the train and platform, cops "did not find a firearm," O'Donnell said.

She did not say whether the individuals were searched, but Grobani witnessed officers searching their pockets and the woman's purse after removing them from the train car.

The scene stunned straphangers, some who filmed the encounter with police, which stopped the train for at least 15 minutes. A longer version of Grobani's video shows more of the confused reaction from the couple as police detain them on the subway platform:

"It was scary and chaotic and confusing and no one had any idea what to do," Grobani said. "What I take away from this, if there was somebody on that train who was dangerous, they didn't get that person. ... For me, it begs the question of—I have no idea if what I saw was lawful—I just think it's so unclear what our rights are as New Yorkers when it comes to the NYPD."

Michael Sisitzky of the New York Civil Liberties Union said the angry confusion seen in the video may have been avoidable if the officers had provided more context around the encounter.

In such a "crowded subway car with that heavy of a presence, officers really need to be focused on what steps they can [take] to de-escalate and prevent the situation from getting out of hand," Sisitzky, lead policy counsel at the non-profit, told Gothamist. "That should be front of mind in all of these encounters."

Under the Right to Know Act—which took effect in 2018 to combat illegal stop-and-frisks—officers are supposed to provide information about the stop and identify themselves. In what's called a Level 3 stop, if an "officer believes you are armed, they officer may frisk you, and potentially search you," according to the NYPD's overview of the law. But the law also requires they provide identification and explain the encounter, which appeared not to have been provided when the couple was removed from the train.

"It's not unusual the way that this played out, but it's unfortunate that the lack of information often leads to the type of escalation that was evident on the video," Sisitzky said. "In situations like this and countless others, the emphasis should be on officers to de-escalate encounters."

The NYPD did not provide additional information about the 911 call, the individuals' names or ages, or if officers told the couple why they were being detained.