NYPD Officer Who Tackled James Blake Placed on 'Modified Assignment'

The city — and the nation — demanded answers on Wednesday after reading retired black tennis star James Blake’s nauseating account of a violent takedown by five NYPD officers in front of his Manhattan hotel.

The NYPD’s damage control team acted fast. By around midnight on Wednesday night, the department announced that it had placed one officer on “modified assignment.”

“Subsequent to Internal Affairs investigators viewing surveillance video of the incident at the Hyatt Hotel on Wednesday, September 9, involving James Blake, one officer has been placed on modified assignment,” the NYPD said in a statement sent to Patch. “The investigation is ongoing.”

Blake was reportedly mistaken for a suspected member of a New York-based identity theft ring.

Five plainclothes NYPD officers tackled him, slammed him to the ground and handcuffed him outside the Grand Hyatt New York on East 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, he told the New York Daily News.

Blake, a 35-year-old tennis great in town to attend the U.S. Open, said he was waiting for a car to take him to Flushing Meadows, Queens, where he planned to make corporate appearances for Time-Warner Cable. He was texting on his phone, he said, when he looked up and saw someone in shorts and a T-Shirt charging at him.

From the Daily News:

“Maybe I’m naïve, but I just assumed it was someone I went to high school with or something who was running at me to give me a big hug, so I smiled at the guy,” Blake said. Blake said the officer, who he said was not wearing a badge, picked him up and threw him down on the sidewalk, yelled at him to roll over on his face and said, “Don’t say a word.”

Blake said he told the officer he would cooperate, but was eventually surround by four additional officers. He said officers told him he had been identified by two people as someone who had been involved in an identity-theft ring operating in the area recently.

Officers had him handcuffed for about 15 minutes, Blake said, before the last of the five officers realized they had the wrong person and apologized. However, according to Blake, the officer who tackled him never said sorry or otherwise admitted wrongdoing.

Blake said all of the officers involved were white. He told the Daily News that he would like an apology from the NYPD and would like to know that there would be some repercussions for the officers involved — “so they know it’s not okay to go out there and do this again tomorrow.”

Read the full Daily News report here.