It is, unfortunately, a fairly common situation: a bus driver gets into a heated argument with a rider. More times than is acceptable, the driver gets the worst of it. It’s rare that the rider is the one on the end of an assault — but that’s exactly what happened in the video above, which has been widely circulated around the Internet over the last 24 hours.
For those who haven’t seen the video yet, here are the basics: a man, trying to board a bus, is confronted by what WMATA spokesperson Dan Stessel said the agency is “99 percent sure” is a Metro employee. (The uniform is a match, and in extended versions of the clip, signage saying “Friendship Heights” is visible.) The driver responds to the man’s attempts to board the bus by first telling him to “get off the bus now,” then by grabbing him and shoving him once, and then again, hard enough that the man falls out of the bus and hits the ground with a loud thud.
Stessel tells us that the transit agency — with both WMATA’s bus operations division and the Metro Transit Police involved — is conducting a thorough investigation into the matter, but they’re currently handcuffed by a general lack of information.
“We don’t know when the video was filmed,” Stessel said this afternoon. “So we are asking for the person who filmed it to give some info on the date, time and bus route.”
Stessel told us that without such logistical information, the transit agency is going to have a tough time proving at a hearing that any driver was actually the one responsible for the violence. “It’s a grainy photo, and in a hearing, someone could argue ‘that wasn’t me’,” said Stessel. WMATA could really benefit, he added, from some additional evidence, “in the form of a written statement” or even an identification of the person that shot the video or the man who was shoved. (If it’s the latter, then there’s a victim of a crime, and the Metro Transit Police could also ramp up their investigative efforts.) If anyone was on the bus when the man was shoved off, they should contact Transit Police or report it to Metro’s customer feedback forms, which are being closely monitored for reports about the incident.
“What we’re seeing in this video is completely unacceptable. We are looking to take all appropriate action in this case,” Stessel stressed.
