Former NYPD detective Dr. Oscar Odom on Thursday pushed back against attacks on police officers during the protests over police brutality, calling it “unacceptable behavior.”
“When they take the poll, they’re talking to the wrong people. They need to talk to the family members who have people who were murdered, robbed, and assaulted. Look at the data, evidence-based and data-driven,” Odom told “America’s Newsroom.” “We have over 800 shooting victims in NYC. We have over 600 shooting incidents, we have over 200 murdered. The data does not lie.”
A protester assaulted a group of New York Police Department (NYPD) cops, including the highest-ranking uniformed member of the department, on Wednesday during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge, according to police and footage of the attack.
The NYPD announced in a tweet around 12:30 p.m. that at least three officers were hurt by someone swinging a long object at the officers while they were placing someone under arrest on the opposite side of one of the bridge’s fences.
A police department spokesperson said the chief of department, Terence Monahan, is the other white-shirt member of the department seen in the video with the group at the time of the attack and suffered a non-life-threatening hand injury.
The video shows someone from the group along the bridge approaching the edge of the fence, leaning over and whacking the officers huddled against the barrier. Three officers suffered serious injuries, the tweet states.
After the first melee, another chaotic brawl occurred between more protesters and police near the where the first one happened.
Odom said that critics of the police department must pay attention to the crime going on in the city.
“People need to stop Monday morning quarterbacking on what police officers should do. If you have a problem, don’t be a part of the problem, be a part of the solution,” Odom said.
“Come on out here and talk. Bring the academics and politicians. Put them inside a car. Let them do some ride-alongs so that they can calculate their data so they can see it firsthand and see what the men and women in blue go out there and do who put their lives on the line every day and respond to these incidents. When you think about it, we get the call ‘man with a gun’ and we respond to the shooting. We don’t run away, we respond.”
*story by Fox News