Black security officer attacked on duty quits TV after white boss interrupts interview, blames him for assault

A security guard resigned from his job during an interview with Fox 7 in Austin after his white supervisor blamed him for an on-the-job assault.

Two young suspicious men attacked Percy Payne and destroyed property within the car parking zone of an office constructing he was paid to guard. In a shocking and blatant case of victim blaming, Payne’s manager at Priebe Security Services screamed at him from off-camera as he told reporters in regards to the incident: “Listen, Percy, I would not touch him! I would not touch him! You touched him!”

On June 24, around 9:30 p.m., Payne said he saw two men on surveillance video enter the private underground garage at his workplace at East sixth and Brushy St. in East Austin. “I witnessed two young Latino males riding two electric scooters,” he said. Nov 7.

When he got here downstairs he saw the lads near his automobile and thought they were attempting to steal it.

“One person was standing by the motive force’s door, together with his back to me, looking back. The second person stood by the passenger door, facing me, and acted as an observer,” he recalls. When he tried to arrest the 2 suspects, the situation escalated.

“A teen tried to run me over together with his scooter several times. And that is once they began attacking me,” Payne told a neighborhood news agency, adding that he noticed a screwdriver protruding of certainly one of the person’s pockets.

“I heard the person say, ‘Hold him.’ And then he reached for the screwdriver to stab me. I let go of them and immediately went to get my work phone to call 911,” Payne said.

The remainder of the attack was captured on surveillance video, leaving little question that Payne was simply doing his job.

Surveillance footage shows two men with hoods covering their faces leaving the car parking zone on scooters, with Payne following them on foot. As the 2 suspects drove down the exit, certainly one of them hit a gate and fell off his scooter, giving Payne a likelihood to catch up. The footage shows Payne and the person who crashed talking face-to-face in an apparently calm manner while the second suspect circled the pair on a scooter.

In the subsequent clip, Payne is seen fighting with two men at a car parking zone gate. As certainly one of the lads attempted to punch and kick Payne, the opposite picked up what seemed to be a filled plastic water bottle and threw it on the security guard, narrowly missing his head. In the two-on-one fight, Payne and certainly one of the suspects landed at the very least one punch on one another. In the subsequent clip, Payne walked down the parking ramp by himself.

Payne later TMZ said that he was frustrated with the police response to an on-duty incident.

Despite the threat to his safety and his valiant try to thwart the suspects, his supervisor later reprimanded him in an interview with Fox 7 for breaking company policy and talking to the press while in uniform.

“We’re so sorry this happened to you,” she told Payne, stopping midway through the interview. “We have a rule that no interviews may be conducted in uniform. If you must do it as a non-public citizen, you may,” she said off-camera.

Payne was wearing a light-colored shirt with two illegible patches and an illegible ID badge.

He took a deep breath to calm himself and said, “I understand what you are saying, nevertheless it’s also my safety. And only in this fashion will my situation be clarified.

According to a neighborhood reporter, Payne has decided to finish his on-air profession. Although the manager’s vision was blurry through the interview, it was clear that tensions were constructing as she waved the phone in a single hand and told Payne to take off his uniform.

The video cut to Payne in his civilian clothes — a Cleveland Browns football jersey — as he patiently endured the barrage of shouting. “Listen, Percy, I wouldn’t have touched him! I wouldn’t have touched him! You touched him!”

When he calmly asked her if she thought the incident was his fault, the unidentified manager doubled down on his absurd behavior and replied, “I might say yes. Every bit.”

At that moment, the shocked man said, “OK, OK,” looking into the space. Showing incredible politeness, he told her, “Thank you. No worries.”

He later summed up the heated exchange with reporters: “The fact that my supervisor told me it was my fault that I was attacked allowed me to learn everything I needed to know.”

Priebe Security Services has a Google rating of three.1 based on 112 reviews, with lots of the negative comments coming from people claiming to be former employees from at the very least three years ago. An organization representative recently told Fox that it was “reviewing the situation” in Payne’s case.