Ayesha Omar, 25, who lives in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “This is my life and I need the NYPD to stand up for me.”

Rasha Elman, a 20-year-old student studying marketing at the Manhattan College of Technology, was arrested while walking the block with her friend.

“I was arrested just like anybody with a similar crime,” Mr Elman told CNN. “And I’m surprised that people are so ignorant about it.”

He says the cops approached him for no reason and arrested three or four times.

“Everybody was shocked,” he said. “I didn’t even have an ID on me…They took no explanation and just took me.”

Mr Elman says the NYPD responded in the most aggressive and racist way.

“They gave me a ticket and they said, ‘Oh so you can’t go,'” he recalled. “I have to go back in my neighborhood because I don’t want to get involved. I need to be free.”

It took more than a month for the NYPD to return his ticket and arrest him.

Ms O’Halloran said there was a big misunderstanding at the beginning of the incident. She and her male friend went into the Brooklyn corner store where their friend runs his own small business, and they bought two bags of doughnuts and an oversized soda at around midnight.

The couple has lived on the Lower East Side for 10 years and has been going there since they were kids.

“This is how it’s supposed to be,” said Ms O’Halloran. “This should be the way it should be.”

Ms O’Halloran says the encounter was a fluke – and one she was expecting. “I think police did it out of ignorance.

“And that is my fault because we’re here. There is nothing they can do,” she continued. “It was all of their fault. It’s their fault because they were the ones who stopped us and stopped us from going inside the store.”