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The 13-year-old told the Observer: “I’d turned around to see if my dad had caught up behind me, and suddenly this man came out of nowhere. He was crazy angry and shouting. I got scared because I thought he might be mugging me or trying to give me corona so I ran, but there was nowhere to go but in the bushes.”
While he was down on the ground, the teenager says the officer pointed a Taser at him and threatened to shoot. The officer then arrested Huugo and put him in handcuffs. Further down the towpath, his father, Andrew, 43, was told to get on his knees and put his hands behind his back. Andrew was also handcuffed. The two were detained, suspected to have been involved in a stabbing in the area.
Andrew said: “If this was a normal stop and search, I could respect that. But it is obvious why we were treated the way we were. The police came in at high-octane aggression level 10. We were on a family bike ride, and my son was essentially assaulted by a police officer. We were threatened with Tasers even though we weren’t resisting, and then just put in handcuffs.”
The incident, which occurred around 6.30pm on Thursday 4 June, drew between six and eight police officers to the scene. The officers said they were responding to a stabbing in a nearby park, and that the father and son matched the description of the assailants. One officer, when questioned by Paton on camera, said: “The victim at this point was very unwilling to give us descriptions. The only thing he has given us is IC3 [police code for a black person] males on a bike … That’s very vague, isn’t it?”
