A North Jersey police officer has come under fire after raw cellphone video of him allegedly threatening three young people was posted to YouTube earlier this month.
An investigation is underway after the video of Passaic Sgt. Roy Bordamonte allegedly taunting the people with threats to deport their parents went viral, NorthJersey.com reports.
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside City Hall last week demanding that he be fired for comments he allegedly made in the video. A change.org petition calling for Bordamonte’s removal has more than 2,500 signatures.
Bordamonte was removed from the department's bias crimes unit last week. While he remains the supervisor of the department's controversial Quality of Life patrol unit, he is not allowed to leave his desk job at police headquarters to respond to calls on the street, acting Police Chief Rosario Capuana said.
Capuana added that Bordamonte acknowledged that it was his voice on the audio.
In the video, which was posted on Facebook by Passaic resident Jazmin Vidal on Sept. 10, a woman is shown holding an iPhone while a young man stands by her side. The police officer who has stopped them wants to know what they are doing out at that time of night and says he's going to give them a ticket, for reasons that are unclear. He's heard saying he suspects they are children of Mexican immigrants, and threatens to find their parents and deport them.
"Don't worry, I'm going to knock on your [expletive] door, and I'm going to check your mom's ID, and all your [expletive] cousins and relatives, and when they give me a fake [expletive] name, I'm going to have immigration pick everybody up so they can go back to the [expletive] border or where they [expletive] came from," the man can be heard saying. "And all the hard work they came to America, you [expletive] it up."
According to Vidal's Facebook post, the incident took place in October 2014. Capuana said the department only recently learned about it when the video gained attention.
The city of Passaic is 70 percent Latino, according to NorthJersey.com.
Watch the video below. Warning: Video contains offensive language.
Read more from NorthJersey.com here.