A video circulating on social media appears to show a Philadelphia police officer arriving at a home in a police vehicle, walking across a lawn toward a man, and then pushing him after the man told the officer not to come onto the property. The same clip shows the officer repeatedly smacking the phone of another person who was recording the encounter, and that person claims the officer threatened to shoot him in the head.
According to NBC10 Philadelphia, the video shows the officer claiming that a man had liked his daughter's Instagram photo, which appears to have triggered the confrontation. Philadelphia police told the station they were aware of the video and were investigating it, though the department has not confirmed when or where the incident occurred. A separate clip description, cited by NBC10 Philadelphia, similarly describes the officer confronting and pushing a man before smacking the camera of another man filming nearby.
Not every outlet has described the department's response the same way. A report from theunionstar.com, which says the clip was posted on November 6 and shows a uniformed officer confronting two young men over his daughter's Instagram photos, stated that there was no word from the department at the time that article was written. The discrepancy between the two accounts has not been resolved, and it is not clear whether the department's position changed between the two reports.
What the Video Appears to Show
In the footage, one of the two young men can reportedly be heard asking the officer for his badge number while filming, per theunionstar.com. The outlet reports that the officer is not named in the clip, and neither are the two men, leaving key identifying details unconfirmed. The report also notes that no badge number is visible anywhere in the footage, and no complaint is shown being filed during the exchange.
The clip does not make clear how the officer located the two men in the first place. As theunionstar.com put it, nothing in the video establishes that he used police databases to do it — a distinction that has not stopped the footage from fueling speculation online.
Online Reaction Mounts
By the morning of November 8, the video had drawn roughly 1,800 likes and 681 comments, according to theunionstar.com's report. Commenters reportedly zeroed in on one particular question: how did the officer get the men's home address from a few likes on Instagram? That question remains unanswered in the available reporting, and the circumstances that preceded the confrontation are still unclear.
For now, the investigation into the incident remains open, with Philadelphia police having acknowledged only that they are reviewing the video. No timeline for the inquiry's conclusion has been made public.
