Bike-push victim Christopher Long is on the stand in Manhattan today, telling a jury how he crashed to the Times Square pavement, looked up, and saw the rookie cop who’d shoved him.
“He said, ‘Did you think you were going to go right through me?'” Long, 31, of Passaic, NJ, testified Officer Patrick Pogan looked down and told him.
“Would you like to try that again?” Long said the cop taunted.
Long — a sometimes green-market worker and admitted stoner in red suspenders, who told jurors he pulled his first bicycle out of the trash six years ago, is the prosecution’s star witness in the odd, police misconduct case.
“He managed to halt my inertia and change my vector,” Long testified, describing the moment of collision in his quirky speaking style.
Pogan is on trial after getting caught on video two years ago striding through a crowd of whooping and cheering Critical Mass cycling activists and violently shoving Long to the ground at Seventh Avenue and 47th Street. The footage became an instant You Tube classic.
The ex-cop — who resigned shortly after the incident — faces misdemeanor assault charges for the shove. But the most serious charge he’s fighting at trial is felony falsifying records for allegedly lying in a sworn criminal complaint against Long.
In charging Long with assault and resisting arrest — charges quickly dropped — Pogan had basically flipped reality, prosecutors say, claiming Long veered toward him, not the other way around, and knocked the officer down, again not the other way around as depicted in two onlooker videos.
Under direct examination by prosecutor Ryan Connors, Long admitted he was discharged after four years in the Army after a random drug screen came up positive for marijuana.
He also admitted that after hearing Pogan’s alleged taunt — “Would you like to try that again?” — he did some taunting of his own, claiming he had herpes and daring Pogan, “Assault me!” as Pogan and his partner struggled to handcuff the writhing rider.
“By exhorting them to assault me, I wanted the situation to go all the way. I was just really, really hyped up and very excited and it seemed like the next thing that was going to happen was that I was going to get punched out. And I didn’t want to wait for that to happen.” he said.
Defense lawyer Stuart London began cross-examining Long, hard, shortly after noon.
“Right now, how often do you get stoned?” London grilled the sometimes snarky cyclist, who cheerfully told of his “Nick-bag-a-day” marijuana habit. “That would be a five dollar bag — that’s why they call it a nick bag,” he explained, helpfully.
London also asked Long about his checkered past: the army discharge, a fatal driving accident in North Carolina in 2001, a speeding ticket for doing 96 miles per hour shortly thereafter, and an arrest late last year in Brooklyn for drunkenly smashing a side-view mirror on a woman’s car.