Homeless Shelter Officer Is Suspended After Hitting a Resident

A police officer for the New York City Department of Homeless Services was suspended on Wednesday, the city said, after a video circulated showing him hitting a shelter resident in the face.

The resident was a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela — one of thousands of migrants who arrived from the southern border this summer and who have put the city’s shelter system under severe strain. The video shows the migrant, Meiver Martinez, yelling at the officer repeatedly in Spanish, “Don’t hit me,” and then kicking a locker, at which point the officer strikes him on the cheek. Mr. Martinez said the officer had been harassing him because he was slow to get out of bed.

Moments after the officer hit him, Mr. Martinez said, about eight officers jumped on him, kicked him, punched him and used a stun gun on him three times. He was taken away in an ambulance in handcuffs though he was not charged with any crime, he said, and was treated at a hospital.

The Department of Homeless Services declined to identify the officer, to say whether he was suspended with or without pay, or to answer other questions about the incident. It said in a statement, “We do not tolerate any violence or misconduct against our clients,” adding that it was conducting “a full investigation” and was “cooperating with the district attorney’s office” as part of it.

The incident occurred at the Bedford-Atlantic Armory in Brooklyn, a castle-like structure that is home to one of the city’s biggest men’s shelters.

New York is struggling to accommodate a tide of migrants that has swelled the shelter population by more than 5,000 in a matter of weeks. Well over a thousand of them were sent up on buses by the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, as part of a campaign to push President Biden to tighten border security.

Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, a Democrat, has officially welcomed the migrants, but advocates say that many of them have had to endure red tape, language barriers, harassment and problems getting basics like food and diapers.

Mr. Martinez, a former student and fruit-stand worker who arrived in New York a month ago after a three-month trek to the U.S., mostly on foot, said that he returned to the shelter at about 6 a.m. on Wednesday morning after working an eight-hour shift cleaning an Orthodox Jewish school.

He said the shelter staff allowed him to go to his bed even though he had stayed out past curfew. Two hours later, he said, he was awakened by the officer grabbing his feet and addressing him with a four-syllable profanity. “I don’t know English, but I know that word,” he said through an interpreter.

Mr. Martinez said he sat up but was still moving too slowly for the officer’s liking, so the officer started pounding on a locker. “I said to the officer, ‘If I stay sitting here, what’s going to happen?’ And he starts hitting my back,” he said.

In the video, shot by another shelter resident, Mr. Martinez can be seen wagging his finger at the officer’s face, while yelling at him not to hit him. The officer then strikes Mr. Martinez, and a shelter worker steps between the migrant and the officer to try to defuse the situation. Mr. Martinez said the officer used a closed fist.

Mr. Martinez said that officers surged into the room and tried to get residents to stop recording the interaction and to delete their videos. He said that when he started shouting “Don’t delete the video,” the officer who hit him shoved him, and the gang of officers jumped on him. He said that the stun gun to his hand felt “like there were knives in my fingers” and that he could not breathe.

Advocates for the migrants say that many of them have fled shelters after being harassed and assaulted by residents and mistreated by staff. Mr. Martinez stayed in a sanctuary operated by an aid group on Wednesday night.

He said that he was not impressed with the New York City shelter system so far. “In Venezuela,” he said, “the only people that get treated like this are people who maybe robbed or murdered somebody. This is worse because it was done to an innocent person.”