Police Commissioner Bill Bratton rolled out the red carpet Friday for the Swedish cops who bravely stopped a subway beatdown — saying they’re a “great honor” to their country.
The tourist cops — Samuel Kvarzell, Markus Asberg, Eric Jansberger and Erik Naslund — broke up a brawl between two homeless men on an uptown 6 train Wednesday.
“I would like to acknowledge them. There’s been a lot of attention paid to them, appropriately so, over the last day or so: a New York Post story and some other coverage,” Bratton said at an NYPD promotion ceremony at One Police Plaza.
“Gentlemen, thank you very, very much. You did a great honor to yourselves, certainly to your police service and to your country. We appreciate all the help we can get,” he said.
“Here as tourists, they stepped up,” he said.
He added the restraining techniques the officers used — which were captured on video taken by a straphanger — are similar to what the NYPD now teaches.
“I was noticing that the moves that they made are very much the same moves that we now teach our young people at the academy in terms of how to take people down in a way trying to ensure that they’re not injured during that apprehension,” Bratton said.
Bratton also said he privately presented the Swedish quartet with medallions on Thursday.
The rookie officers, who all work in the Stockholm area, will again be honored at home when they return, said a spokesman for Anders Ygema, Sweden’s minister for home affairs.
“The minister has invited the police officers to the government office for lunch once they get back to Sweden,” spokesman Fredrik Persson said in an e-mail Friday.
The four patrolmen were in the audience as Bratton praised them, but didn’t speak.
On Thursday, Asberg told The Post he didn’t want to talk because their bravery was “no big deal.”
But Bratton disagrees.
“[They] found themselves involved a situation on the subway where they activated themselves as police officers,” Bratton said.
“We very much appreciate that,” he said.
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