Crdit: Victor Moussa / Adobe Stock

Raise your hand if, like me, you stayed up late on Wednesday and couldn't fall asleep after doomscrolling your social media feed. Yes, just as it sounds, doomscrolling is a bad thing. It's scrolling down through your social media feed and seeing only really bad news. You try to stop, then just scroll more bad news.

But I saw one video that night on Twitter that I was sure was fake. It was a bunch of high school kids hanging out in a New Jersey shopping mall when a fight broke out between two of them.

One young man was white and the other was Black. It wasn't a particularly even fight, with the former getting in more punches and doing more damage, one would imagine. That part all looked real.

Then it became unreal or even surreal when two police officers jumped in and both went straight for the Black young man, tackling him, putting a knee in his back, and handcuffing him. Not only did they leave the white kid alone, he moved closer to the handcuffed kid and kept talking to him before one of the officers got up.

This is staged, we all thought. Something for a Fail Army video compilation. Not funny on any day but particularly these days. Whoever posted this has no ability to read the collective room that is the nation today.

But I, for one, kept scrolling and found this absolutely remarkable tweet by New Jersey's Governor, Phil Murphy:

Although an investigation is still gathering the facts about this incident, I'm deeply disturbed by what appears to be racially disparate treatment in this video. We're committed to increasing trust between law enforcement and the people they serve.

And, in a matter of seconds, I dealt with the same reality that we all did: This seemingly scripted scene was, and is, actually real.

How fitting that this happened in a mall. The mall became iconic for us in Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's a film in which the notion of a suburban shopping mall became part of the American imagination. It's where friendships were solidified and young people discovered themselves in a safe environment. As we were reminded yesterday, how things have changed.

Krenar Camili, a New Jersey lawyer, argues that the outrage many of us feel today isn't misdirected:

The last thing any police force in New Jersey ever wants to see is the Governor tweeting about police behavior just after an incident. If a full investigation shows wrongdoing, there is definitely the potential for discipline against the police officers involved or even criminal charges.

Criminal charges stemming from the investigation Governor Murphy mentioned aren't the only legal possibility. The family of the young man pinned to the ground and handcuffed has surely already hired a lawyer to represent them.

Camili adds that whether the officers are charged, the family has other options as well, in civil court:

If the family of the young man who was handcuffed believe that police officers behaved in a dangerous and inappropriate manner, they might consider a civil lawsuit. A civil suit and criminal charges are not mutually exclusive—the family could bring a civil suit even if no criminal charges materialize from an investigation.

One thing that stood out to me was that, aside from the young person who was recording this on their phone, all of the other kids scurried away from the scene like rats, one even scurrying back in to grab his jacket.

While there are a lot of lessons to be learned here, one one for the handcuffed young man is that he needs better friends. Situations such as this need to be documented and part of a broader national discussion as to how we treat each other.

After a really exhausting past two years, we long for the safety of a Ridgemont, California, shopping mall from 1982, because what we saw yesterday in Bridgewater, New Jersey, isn't where we want to be.