Friday's 3D 13 Dimensional Dance Party at the Bushwick collective Surreal Estate became infamous yesterday, as video circulated of what appeared to be a plainclothes police officer threatening a civilian with imprisonment and rape. ("You're gonna go to jail, and you're gonna get abused in jail. The guys in jail are gonna rape you," the alleged officer says to the cameraman, Vladimir Teichberg.) Needless to say, outrage swiftly followed, at Gothamist, Gawker, and here, among other places. Now, however, the NYPD have responded, saying that the tie-dyed psychopath who appears on Teichberg's tape is not a police officer at all. Said a department spokesperson to us just now: "He's not a cop. That guy with the iPhone and tie-dye? Not a cop." The spokesperson, Detective Cheryl Crispin, went on to tell us that "he was a drunken guy who ended up getting a summons," shortly after getting kicked out of a club and stumbling over to Surreal Estate, where he began threatening Teichberg. Crispin was adamant: "The individual in the video who is making the statements that you are referring to is not an NYPD officer," she said.

The mass exodus after the cops hit the door. All photos by Robert Sietsema

Surreal Estate is one of Bushwick's many sprawling, quasi-legal, live/work/party spaces, a nominally community-centered resource that hosts everything from Food Not Bombs to anarchist book fairs to noise fests. On Friday, it became the scene of a near riot and police confrontation, as cops choose the occasion of the space's 3D 13 Dimensional Dance Party--featuring, among many others, Liquid Liquid's Sal P and the six-piece brass band Underground Horns--to raid the commune. Things got out of hand relatively quickly. Gothamist reports that 10 people were arrested, and a camera-wielding bystander, Vladimir Teichberg, came home with a souvenir: a video clip of a plainclothes cop threatening to throw Teichberg in jail where, the officer promised, he'd be abused and raped. Our own Robert Sietsema was there that night, so we asked him for his account. The whole thing popped off, according to Robert, at around 12:30 a.m., when a pair of co-eds from Jacksonville, Florida decided to skip a half-hour bathroom line and go outside to pee: