‘I Was Angry’: Black Teen Who Cops Roughed and Cuffed in NJ Mall Fight with White Teen Speaks Out to CNN

Z’Kye Husain, the Black teenager who was roughly arrested during a fight while the White aggressor sat unrestrained on a couch, spoke out to CNN about his treatment by police in a now-viral video.

The fight was captured on video, as was the aftermath in which police in Bridgewater, New Jersey, pulled a White teen off of Z’Kye and sat him down on a couch before roughly detaining and cuffing Z’Kye.

On Friday morning’s edition of CNN’s New Day, Z’Kye, his mother Ebone, and their attorney Benjamin Crump spoke out about the incident.

Co-anchor John Berman played a portion of the video, which has stirred nationwide outrage, then introduced his guests.

“You say the fight broke out after you tried to defend a seventh-grader from the person you ended up fighting with who you say is a high school student,” Berman said, and asked Z’Kye “What happened next?”

“Cops came over, an officer put his, he came, put me to the ground, put his knee on my back and started handcuffing me. The female officer? That was with the other boy, he left, and helped to put the handcuffs in there and put her knee in my back too,” the teen explained.

“It looks like the other, teen based on the video, we saw, threw you on the ground. When police arrived, they pulled him off. Put you in handcuffs. What was going through your head as this was happening?” Berman asked.

“I felt like, inferior, like I was less important,” Z’Kye said, then explained he didn’t know about the difference in treatment until he saw the video.

“And when you found out that he’d been sitting on the couch and you were in handcuffs, what do you think about that?” Berman asked.

“I was like mad. I was angry, that they treated me differently,” Z’Kye said.

Z’Kye’s mother expressed outrage at the disparity, and Attorney Crump demanded accountability for the officers.

“I think they should be suspended, or if they were doing biased police, they need to be terminated,” Crump said, “because what message are we sending to society, especially our young children, our young minority children like Z’Kye, if they say the police are going to treat us differently?”

“We’re presumed guilty and white kids are presumed innocent. We have over 100,000 black men in prison, wrongfully incarcerated. It starts with incidents like this. What we see on that video,” Crump said.

Watch above via CNN.