57 Buffalo city police officers quit after two were suspended for pushing protester

Atleast 57 members of the police tactical unit in Buffalo, New York resigned from the team on Friday to protest the suspension of two colleagues for pushing a 70-year-old man to the ground outside the City Hall on Thursday during the ongoing protests, the local media reported.

Two members of the Buffalo Police Department`s Emergency Response Team were suspended after the incident which was filmed on camera was released by a local radio station.

A spokesperson for the local county's district attorney, Kait Munro, said the two officers are under investigation for potential criminal liability in connection with the incident.

While Buffalo Police Benevolent Association President John Evans said that the officers who have been suspended were simply doing their job, and that their colleagues on the response team had resigned from the special unit to protest their treatment, local media quoted Evans as saying.

The Buffalo city Mayor Byron Brown on Friday said that contingency plans were in place to address any policing issues due to the resignations. He said he believed the Police Benevolent Association put pressure on officers in the tactical unit by threatening to withdraw support to them if they did not resign from that team. Brown said in a television interview to CNN.

"I don`t think unions should behave that way. That was not an act to protect the worker. That was an act to intimidate police officers and to not protect the residents of our community," he added.

The video shows a white-haired man approaching a line of officers who are in riot gear while one officer pushes him with a baton the second one shoves him with his hand. The white-haired man, identifed as Martin Gugino, falls and blood trickles from his head.

The video shows the majority of the officers march past the injured man though the officer who pushed him with a baton starts to lean over him before he is motioned away by another officer. Someone is heard calling for a medic, according to a report by Reuters.

Even New York Governor Andrew Cuomo criticised the act saying, "You see that video and it disturbs your basic sense of decency and humanity," Cuomo told reporters at a daily briefing. "Why, why, why was that necessary? Where was the threat?", he said.

The incident has raised further questions about police behaviour after the death of African-American man George Floyd in Minneapolis has set off nationwide protests.

(With inputs from Reuters)