This wasn’t the greeting Olympian James Blake is used to getting in New York during the U.S. Open.
The former tennis star says as many as five plainclothes police officers tackled and handcuffed him Wednesday outside his Manhattan hotel, according to the New York Daily News.
Blake, 35, was waiting for a car to pick him up and take him to the tennis tournament, where he’s doing corporate appearances, the paper said.
New York police told CNN that Blake was detained during an ongoing investigation after a witness misidentified him.
“I’m shaken up,” Blake said Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “A couple bumps and bruises, but all right.”
Detectives from the Identity Theft Task Force were investigating the purchase of cell phones using fraudulent credit cards, two law enforcement sources told CNN.
Investigators organized a sting operation at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, where phones were delivered to a male suspect later taken into custody, the law enforcement sources said.
That suspect identified two people in the hotel’s lobby to whom he had delivered cell phones purchased with a fraudulent credit card, the sources added.
Blake, once ranked No. 4 in the world, was one of the people placed in handcuffs but was let go shortly after a retired New York police officer informed detectives that he was a tennis player.
“Once Blake was properly identified and found to have no connection to the investigation, he was released from police custody immediately,” the New York Police Department said in a statement.
The second person identified by the suspect was taken into custody, the sources said.
‘It’s blatantly unnecessary’
Blake suffered a cut to his left elbow and bruises to his left leg, according to the Daily News.
The former tennis pro, whose father was black and whose mother is white, said he doesn’t understand why the officers roughed him up. The Daily News reported they are white.
“In my mind there’s probably a race factor involved, but no matter what, there’s no reason for anybody to do that to anybody,” he told the News.
“I was just standing there. I wasn’t running. It’s not even close (to being OK). It’s blatantly unnecessary.”
Blake told “Good Morning America” that he initially thought a friend was running toward him to try and surprise him with a bear hug.
Instead, “he picked me up and body-slammed me and put me on the ground and told me to turn over and shut my mouth and put the cuffs on me,” Blake told ABC.
He said he cooperated and tried to explain who he was and provide his identification but that his explanations were ignored.
New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton has ordered an internal affairs probe into the incident. But he flatly denied accusations that race played a role in targeting Blake.
“Sorry, race has nothing at all to do with this,” Bratton told CNN’s “New Day” on Thursday. “If you look at the photograph of the suspect, it looks like the twin brother of Mr. Blake. So let’s put that nonsense to rest right now.”
When asked why Blake was tackled during a probe of a nonviolent crime, Bratton said the internal affairs investigation is in its early stages.
Bratton said he watched video of the incident and was concerned about what he called “the inappropriate amount of force in the arrest.”
The footage has already led to one of the officers’ being moved to desk duty, Bratton said.
Police have not publicized the surveillance video from the hotel.
