VIRAL VIDEO: Police Stand Back As Man Stomps On Patrol Cars

Newark, NJ – An angry, emotionally-distressed man performed a very public show of defiance against the Newark Police Department on Saturday when he jumped on top of three different police cruisers (video below).

The incident occurred at about 1:30 p.m. on Aug. 4 in the 300-block of Clinton Place near Lyons Avenue, when a shirtless man wearing black pants and red sneakers jumped on top of an occupied police car.

In a bizarre scene captured on video by a witness, the man stomped around on the roof of the police car before he jumped onto the hood and stomped around some more.

Even stranger than the scene unfolding on the roof was the fact that the police officer remained inside his patrol unit as the man jumped on it, the video showed.

Then the man jumped off the car and went to the driver’s window of the police car, and appeared to engage with the officer for almost a minute before he returned to the front of the car and jumped up on the hood again.

In the video, the man jumped up and down as hard as he could on the cruiser’s hood, making visible dents in the metal.

Bystanders can be heard in the video speculating about why the man is “going crazy” and whether he might be on drugs.

About 90 seconds after the video began, witnesses started speculating about where the officer’s backup was, as the officer continued to sit in the police car that was under assault.

Several times the man squatted down and appeared to engage the officer through the windshield in a menacing manner, the video showed, before he leapt onto the police car’s roof yet again.

Two minutes after the video began, two additional police units arrived to back up the one the man was standing on. They rolled up behind the first car and stopped.

An officer got out of the first backup unit and approached the rear of the police vehicle the man was standing on and talked to him, the video showed.

Then all of a sudden, the man ran down off the back of the police car, past the officer, and up onto the hood and roof of the backup patrol car, the video showed.

People nearby cheered at the man’s antics, and so he took off yet again, down the back of that police car, past another Newark police officer, and up onto the hood and roof of the second backup unit, the video showed.

The man stood screaming unintelligibly on the hood of the third cruiser as bystanders began to heckle him and calling for him to steal a patrol car.

Then the video showed he jumped down off the patrol car and approached the officer, getting close enough to assault him if he had tried.

Despite the hoots and hollers of witnesses that seemed to escalate the man’s antics, police remained calm, the video showed.

Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose told Blue Lives Matter in an email that officers arrested the suspect after the incident.

The man was charged with three counts of criminal mischief and remanded to the Essex County Correctional Center, Director Ambrose said.

He said the Newark PD’s Internal Affairs Unit would be investigating how the officers handled the unusual situation.

Watch the man rampage across the top of three police cars in the video below: