One summer night in 2012, Luis Paulino was walking around his East New York neighborhood when he came upon a group of police officers surrounding a young black man. Onlookers told him that the young man had been stopped for riding his bike on the sidewalk. But what appeared to Luis to be a minor incident suddenly exploded in violence. “More officers started arriving on the scene,” he recounts. “They continued to beat his legs. Then he was thrown in handcuffs. They maced him; they tazed him.”
Standing on the very corner where his own life had changed forever on the night of that assault, Luis recalls feeling he couldn’t walk away. “I just wanted to make sure he was all right,” he tells me. “Honestly the kid could have been my brother.”
He certainly could have been.
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