NEWARK — Two Newark police officers illegally detained a promising city high school student and threatened to have her charged with obstruction of justice after she filmed them on a city bus last year, according to a federal lawsuit filed today in Newark.

According to the lawsuit, 17-year-old Khaliah Fitchette — an honors student at University High School who was recently accepted to several prestigious universities including Cornell — was forcefully grabbed by a Newark officer, handcuffed and illegally searched during the incident last March.

The suit, which names Police Director Garry McCarthy, two officers and a Newark sergeant as defendants, was filed by Fitchette’s mother, Kameelah Phillips, in conjunction with the Seton Hall Center for Social Justice and the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

A press conference to discuss the suit will be held at the ACLU’s Newark office at 3 p.m., and police officials are expected to comment later in the day.

Fitchette was traveling with several classmates on a city bus when a man collapsed a few rows ahead of her, according to the lawsuit. As officers Noemi Maloon and Lloyd Thomas responded to the scene and boarded the bus, the teenager began videotaping the incident with her cell phone, when the suit alleges Maloon ordered her to stop filming and turn off the phone.

Fitchette refused, prompting Maloon to grab the teenage girl, take away her phone and delete the video.

The suit alleges that Maloon and Thomas then handcuffed Fitchette, placed her in the back of a squad car and took her to the city’s Juvenile Processing Center, despite her repeated pleas to call her mother.

Maloon and Thomas did not follow through with their alleged plan to have her criminally charged, according to the suit, eventually returning Flitchette to her mother.

A Sergeant DeFabio, whose first name is unknown, is also accused of conspiring to help Maloon and Thomas charge Fitchette as an adult for obstruction of justice, according to the suit. Juveniles cannot be charged with obstruction of justice, and Fitchette was 16 at the time of the alleged incident.

Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the state ACLU, said Fitchette’s case shows that Newark Police continue to have an issue with civilians rights to film them.

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“If you saw ‘Street Fight’ you already knew that the police didn’t believe citizens had a right to film them,” said Jacobs, referring to a 2002 film documenting now Mayor Cory Booker’s attempt to unseat Sharpe James. “This should have been addressed a long time ago.”

Fitchette’s case marks the third time in as many years when Newark Police have been accused of mistreating residents who were attempting to film them. In 2009, the editor of the Brazilian Voice newspaper sued the department for confiscating a photographer’s camera and handcuffing him to a bench at a police precinct after he photographed a dead body.

Special police officer Brian Sharif was the subject of a lawsuit two years ago after CBS camerman James Quodomine claimed Sharif placed him in a chokehold and handcuffed him while he was filming a city anti-violence protest in 2008.

Disturbing videos of the event show Sharif yelling, “I can do whatever I want” as he grabs Quodomine and arrests him.

The statuses of those lawsuits was not immediately known.

The suit comes months after the ACLU launched a push for federal oversight of the state’s largest department, filing a 96-page petition with the Department of Justice alleging rampant misconduct within the agency. The petition, citing dozens of lawsuits and years of internal affairs statistics, claimed the department is incapable of policing itself.