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Pinned to the ground by officers who kneed and struck him, Lawrence Crosby screamed whatever he could think of to convince them that he was a law-abiding PhD student, not a violent car thief.

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“This is my vehicle, sir,” he said, his voice captured by the dashboard-camera video in October 2015. “I have evidence . . . I purchased this vehicle Jan. 23, 2015, from Libertyville Chevrolet.”

It wasn’t enough. The officers placed him in handcuffs in the driveway of a church, two blocks from the police station in Evanston, Ill.

Police released the dash-cam video earlier this week, detailing the half-hour encounter that sparked a civil suit from Crosby and a discussion about race and policing in this city of 75,000, just north of Chicago.

The video includes footage from the dash cam of one of the officers involved in the altercation. But it’s also synced with video of a personal dash cam Crosby kept running in his car.

On that night, Crosby was headed to Northwestern University, where he was studying for his doctoral degree in civil engineering.

But something was wrong with the molding on his car, so he pulled out a metal bar to try to fix the strip on the roof, he says on the video.

A woman passing by saw him – a black man, wearing a hoodie, with some kind of bar pressed up against a car.