“We can handle this one of two ways,” Const. Paul Mohit allegedly told Vaughn Nembhard as he sat handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser on Queen St. last February. “We let you go now and you forget this ever happened, or we charge you with assaulting a police officer.”

Nembhard thought of what his father had told him the last time he was stopped and questioned by police: make them put everything on the record. “Take me to jail,” he said.

Mohit's partner, Const. Lukasz Aleksandrowicz, shook his head.

“I don't know why you would want to waste a nice Sunday.”

Nembhard, a 35-year-old Rogers customer service agent, is accusing Toronto police of racial profiling and discrimination after he was arrested in February for assaulting a police officer, a charge that was later dropped.

Nembhard believes he was targeted by police, slapped with a bogus charge and arbitrarily strip-searched because of his skin colour and the limp he has walked with since suffering a stroke 13 years ago.

According to his complaint, Nembhard was walking on Queen St. W. in Parkdale — steps away from his Jameson Ave. home — around 1:30 p.m. on Feb. 20. He was about to make a cellphone call when a marked police cruiser entered the driveway in front of him, blocking his path.

From the car, the officers asked where he was going. Nembhard ignored them and walked around the front of the vehicle.

He said he has been questioned and “harassed” by police a number of times in his life — “The first time was when I was 12 or 13” — and since he was not breaking any laws, he did not want to cooperate with them.

Aleksandrowicz and Mohit left their car and stood in Nembhard's way, according to the complaint. They continued to ask him where he was going, where he lived and if he was “wanted.”

Nembhard said the officers — one white, the other Middle Eastern or South Asian — also shoved him and refused to provide their names and badge numbers.

“I still did not know why they were stopping me,” Nembhard says in his complaint. “I asked the officers if they stopped me because I am black. Both of them laughed. They still did not give me a reason for stopping me.”

With his cellphone in hand, Nembhard said he decided to record what was happening. As he did, he said he was tackled to the ground by the officers, who tried to turn off the recording function.

Nembhard was handcuffed and placed in the back of the cruiser.

Moments after the car was started, Nembhard claims the officers pulled over and gave him the ultimatum.

Nembhard said he was strip-searched at the police station, and released five hours later. The officers say they charged Nembhard with assaulting a police officer because he struck Aleksandrowicz in the chest with his right arm.

Nembhard has not been able to move his right arm since his stroke.

The charge against Nembhard was dropped a couple of months later when the Crown concluded there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.

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The Star obtained the disclosure provided to Nembhard while the case was still before the courts, and it describes how police suspected him of concealing a weapon because he was limping with his right arm tucked inside his coat.

“The officers recognized these to be characteristics of an armed person,” the arrest record states.

Nembhard has filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario against the Toronto Police Services Board, Chief Bill Blair and the arresting officers.

None of the allegations has been proven in court and the police have yet to file a statement of defence. Police spokesman Mark Pugash said he could not comment on the allegations. “Our lawyers are still in the process of looking at it,” Pugash said.

Nembhard, who has no criminal record, is seeking $250,000 in compensation for “discrimination, mental and physical suffering, and injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect.”

Nembhard says the incident has left him feeling degraded and humiliated, fearful of police and less productive at work.

“I felt kidnapped,” he said. “And I was just walking in my neighbourhood.”

Nembhard's lawyers, Barry Swadron and Kelley Bryan, called the police claims “outrageous.”

“If it was a white guy with a limp, they would have said, ‘This guy has a disability,' “ said Bryan. “Because he's black they assume he has a weapon.”

Nembhard said his experience is common to his black friends, but wants others to know, too.

“I want people to know this happens a lot more than they think.”

bkennedy@thestar.ca