Illinois police caught beating black man they suspected of stealing his own car

Shortly before he was arrested, the wrongly accused suspect told someone on the phone: ' You know how it is with black people — they think we’re always trying to do something wrong'

"I don’t know if I’m, like, racial profiling. I feel bad."

The woman who called 911 told police she had seen an African American man wearing a hoodie, jimmying a crow bar against what she suspected was a stolen vehicle.

Within minutes, police had tracked down Lawrence Crosby, a black, law-abiding PhD student in Evanston, a city just north of Chicago.

New police video footage shows, on that night in October 2015, Mr Crosby being ordered out of his own car, screamed at by police officers to get on the ground, kneed forcefully in the back and slapped with open hands by five officers to "get him to comply".

"Stop resisting," they said repeatedly.

"I’m cooperating, I’m cooperating," the student replied.

Mr Crosby tried to tell the officers it was his car - he told them where and when he bought it, and that he had just been using the bar to fix the car roof.

"This is my vehicle, sir," he said, as shown by the dashboard camera video.

"I have evidence. . . . I purchased this vehicle January 23, 2015, from Libertyville Chevrolet."

He then said he was a civil engineering PhD and attended Northwestern University.

He asked why he had been placed in handcuffs. Police told him they had to know who the car belonged to.

Mr Crosby was detained two blocks from the police station. He had been driving to the station to explain that a woman had seen him with the metal bar and followed him in her car. She was, unknown to him, relaying his information to the police.

Mr Crosby was aware the situation might have looked bad, and he wanted to head somewhere he felt he would be safe.

"It was a little bit dark," he said to someone on the phone, captured on his dashcam video which he left running during his arrest.

"You know how it is with black people — they think we’re always trying to do something wrong."

Once officers realised the car belonged to Mr Crosby, they arrested him and charged him with disobeying officers and resisting arrest.

A judge threw out the charges, according to Mr Crosby’s lawyer, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

Mr Crosby filed a civil lawsuit in 2016 and the video footage was released this month.

The officers involved in the incident were not reprimanded, and the Evanston Police Department defended its actions, saying the officers were "in compliance with our procedures as it pertains to this type of situation".

Brian Miller, who is running for mayor, told The Washington Post he’s been outraged about the incident ever since he saw the video months ago with the rest of the city council.

"There’s underlying problems in our town that we’re not admitting," he said.

"There’s a true desire that people have — they want to address these problems and actually solve them. But we don’t want to necessarily admit that we have these problems."

A total of 46 people have been killed at the hands of law enforcement in the first 17 days of this year.

In 2015, when Mr Crosby was arrested, 991 people were shot dead by police in the US.