I was trying to catch a cab home from the West Village at around 4am on Friday night when I came across this strange situation. I saw a girl laying on her stomach on the corner of a busy intersection screaming what sounded like “Save Ireland.” As I stood and watched in awe for about 15 minutes, a large crowd started to gather— including the NYPD. The girl must have been on some type of speed. This was not normal drunken behavior— this was absolute insanity. At one point I decided this was too good to not be videotaping, so I started to record the scene with my phone (sorry for the bad quality).

A man, claiming to be a doctor, approached the girl to ask her what was wrong, but she continued to scream the same nonsense about “Ireland” in his ear. The NYPD asked him to leave stating “she’s not going to die.” As he attempted to comply, he lost his balance and tripped backwards— to which one officer responded by grabbing him by the collar and pulling him up. When asked why he was being threatened for trying to help, the officer arrested him immediately. The man was understandably confused, considering he was trying to help this girl as everyone else, including the police, stood around laughing at her. Arresting him, not the girl screaming face down on the pavement, was the obvious decision. Nice work boys.

As he was being put in the back of the police car he kept saying “to serve and protect!” I thought that was a nice touch. You have to love the NYPD’s double standards, though. Had that been a guy on the ground screaming, he would have been arrested for disorderly conduct before any crowd could have witnessed something as ridiculous as this.

Not that I would know anything about that.