A 32-year-old Brooklyn man was arrested this week after he allegedly said it would be "easy to shoot a police officer" and then pointed an iPhone at two officers sitting in their patrol car at a traffic light, according to the NYPD.
Unique Johnson was arrested Tuesday night after two police say he allegedly pointed an iPhone at them as though it were a gun and mimicked a shooting motion twice when the SUV he was driving pulled up next to the officers’ patrol car at West 125th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.
Police said Johnson's car sped off once the light turned green, leaving the two officers terrified by the ordeal.
"I absolutely thought we were dead," said one of the officers.
The officers pulled over Johnson’s SUV a moment later, the NYPD says. When they asked Johnson what he was thinking when he pointed the phone at them, he allegedly said he was showing one of the six coworkers in his vehicle how easy he thought it would be to shoot an on-duty cop.
Johnson is charged with menacing a police officer, harassment, disorderly conduct and aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle. It's not clear if he has an attorney.
The arrest comes days after the NYPD issued a memo to all rank-and-file officers telling them to stay alert for possible attacks following the deaths of three police officers in last week's terror attacks in France and the re-release of an Islamic State video calling for supporters to kill authority figures.
The memo advises officers to pay attention to approaching cars and pedestrians as well as their hands. It also told officers stationed with cruisers at fixed locations to split up, with one officer sitting inside the car and another standing outside to look for possible threats.
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Johnson is one of nearly 30 people to be arrested after making alleged threats against police officers following the deaths of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, who were both shot and killed while sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn last month.
The department says it has investigated 126 threats against officers since the shootings.
