Black teen handcuffed following Bridgewater brawl: "I don't understand why we get treated differently just because of the color of our skin"
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. -- A brawl involving teenagers at a mall in Somerset County has raised questions about policing and race.
On Wednesday, there was a rally with civil rights activists and the family of one of the teens demanding justice. CBS2's Meg Baker was there when the people rallying faced some counter resistance.
Z'kye Husain says he was made to feel inferior when Bridgewater police pinned him down and handcuffed him, and not the other teen involved in a brawl.
"In that instant, she had the choice, handcuff me or go get him, and they still saw me as the aggressor, as the bad guy. I don't understand why we get treated differently just because of the color of our skin," Husain said.
Husain said the fight broke out after he stood up for a friend who was getting picked on by another teen. Husain's parents are demanding justice and change.
"My son is a good kid. He gets good grades in school. The way that the cops treated him was as if he were a bad kid, as if he were doing drugs or something of that nature. I don't support that," Jihad Husain said. "I was in the military. I fought for equality. This is not justice."
The Somerset County Prosecutor's Office said there was nothing new to release and that the matter remains an Internal Affairs investigation.
Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump is representing Z'Kye Husain and his family.
"The police in a split second saw a white kid on top of a Black kid having an altercation and made a determination that the white kid was presumed innocent and the Black kid was presumed guilty," Crump said.
The family and their legal team are calling for more police bias training.
"The attorney general in the state has now dictated that all members of the attorney general's staff, all of their detectives, have to go through implicit bias training, as well as all the state police. But locally, there is no such law," said the NAACP's Gregg L. Zeff.
"People need to know that if they do take actions on their bias, there are severe consequences," mother Ebony Husain said.
The rally was moved inside after grassroots activists took the microphone, claiming that organizers were only there to make money.
"We are tired of people like Al Sharpton and the National Action Network speaking for us," one activist said.
"I got a 14-year-old child, too. Guess what I did yesterday? I walked with the teenagers of Bridgewater. A lot of you adults didn't even show up," another said.
While the grassroots activists and the family's lawyers don't see eye to eye, they have something in common -- the mall brawl surfaces a much broader issue to be solved.
