In October, Officer Michael Franco arrested Kalleen while he was playing his guitar and singing in a Brooklyn subway station. The interaction between the cop and the busker was caught on video, uploaded to the Internet and quickly went viral, gaining 1 million views within two days of posting, Rolling Stone reported.
"Ten-fifty point six C, man. Look it up,” a shoeless Kalleen tells Franco in the video, citing Transit Rule 1050.6, the specific code that permits him to play music and sing on the platform.
Franco had told Kalleen to put his guitar away and exit the premises, saying he was enforcing a so-called "quality of life" violation.
After some arguing, Franco agrees to read the rule aloud, which prohibits non-transit activity on the subway, except for "artistic performances, including the acceptance of donations.”
And while Kalleen thinks he has won, Franco does not share the musician’s interpretation of the law. The officer goes on to explain that he is not arresting Kalleen, but he is ejecting him from the premises. When Kalleen refuses to leave, Franco cuffs him and escorts him out of the station – all to a smattering of boos from onlookers showing their disapproval of the arrest.
In a post to his Tumblr recounting the arrest and announcing his lawsuit against the city, Kalleen says he suffered a bloody lip in the encounter and was jailed for more than five hours.
“I will be filing a lawsuit, and the lawyers I’ve talked to have said that with such clear video evidence for my case, it’s likely I’ll be getting not a huge amount, but in the thousands and potentially tens of thousands of dollars for the assault, wrongful arrest, and jail time,” he wrote.
Kalleen plans to put any damages awarded in the suit back into Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he has lived since 2008, and a community that has “felt the brunt of police misconduct in ways I doubt I’ll ever be able to fully appreciate.”
