The Metropolitan police is to refer a stop and search incident in which one of its officers kneed a handcuffed black man in the head to the Independent Office for Police Conduct following pressure. Video footage of the 18-year-old shows him shouting “I’m not resisting” and “I didn’t do anything” before receiving a knee to the head on 22 April in Hackney after a pursuit by officers who had repeatedly requested him and two other men on bicycles to stop for a weapons search. A member of the public filmed the incident as plain clothes police apprehended the man – whose identity is not known – and made a subsequent complaint this month, saying officers had been “violent and aggressive”. The Met said that a voluntary referral was in the process of being made to the IOPC, the watchdog that investigates the police, following an internal review. If the IOPC deems that an officer has committed a criminal offence, then it submits a report to the Crown Prosecution Service, which decides whether the case is heard in court. Marcus Barnett, a Met commander, said: “I am aware that this footage has raised concerns in the community and of course the incident should be fully investigated. Given the public interest in this matter it is also appropriate that we voluntarily refer it to the IOPC.” The force had said that the 18-year-old was “handcuffed and placed to the floor in an attempt to mitigate any potential issues” in case he had a weapon. The officers were on patrol in response to gang tensions and recent violent incidents. Following the search outside Hackney Pentecostal Apostolic church on Middleton Road, he was allowed to go without a weapon being found. The incident occurred close to the location where another black man, Rashan Charles, died in 2017 after being chased and restrained by an officer. A second witness, a local resident who saw the aftermath and did not wish to be named, said: “The look on his face told me they had been harassing him. He was surrounded by six officers standing against the wall. They said ‘If we see you on the road again we’ll arrest you’.” He added he asked the man how he was and he responded that he was not hurt. Katrina Ffrench, the chief executive of StopWatch, a coalition that promotes fair and accountable policing, said: “We look forward to the outcome of the investigation and hope the IOPC reprimand the officers involved. This behaviour must stop.” Victor Olis, a former Met chief superintendent, this week said there was a growing practice of officers handcuffing young black men who had not been arrested and were not resisting or showing signs of aggression, before they start searching them. He warned that the treatment of young black men by police as their “property”, while their white friends were treated very differently, was a worrying development and that it seemed to “reinforce the stereotype that conflates blackness with dangerousness”. Also remarking on the incident in Greenwich in May where a black man was pepper sprayed while handcuffed, which was also referred to the IOPC and details of which only recently emerged, Olis said there was growing evidence circulating showing what appeared to be excessive force being used by officers when carrying out stop and search. “Now these might be a small number of such incidents when compared to the hundreds of thousands of stops and searches carried out by officers, but consistency of the incidents across different geographical areas and different forces is very worrying,” he told the Guardian. Black people in England and Wales are over nine times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people, according to statistics between April 2018 and March 2019.