Human rights organisation Amnesty International has called on the New South Wales police commissioner to launch an independent investigation into mobile phone footage that appears to show a police officer punching and kneeing an Aboriginal man.
Amnesty International wrote a letter on Wednesday to the NSW police commissioner, Andrew Scipione, about the footage.
"Amnesty International... [is] demanding a public response and investigation into apparent police violence against a young Indigenous person," Roxanne Moore, Amnesty International's Indigenous rights campaigner, told BuzzFeed News.
"The Police Commissioner needs to make a public statement about what appears to be a police officer repeatedly punching and kneeing a young Indigenous man. The violent response we see in the footage could amount to excessive use of force by the police officer."
The vision, filmed earlier this month by an onlooker in the Sydney suburb of Mount Druitt, was widely circulated on social media.
It appears to show a 17-year-old girl and a 27-year-old man being arrested by police. Around two minutes into the video the camera pans sideways to show another man flanked by two police officers.
One of the officers appears to punch the man twice and then knee him in the stomach.
The woman filming the incident yells out, "I got that on film, I got it on film".
It then appears as if someone tries to snatch the camera.
Jamie Burns, the woman who filmed the incident, claims that an officer tried to take her phone and "dragged her". Burns says she had to give her phone to a cousin who "ran away with it" to avoid the police seizing it.
"The police officer involved in the violence seen on camera should be suspended until the investigation is completed, and they should be held accountable if found to have violated the young person’s rights," Moore said.
BuzzFeed News requested an interview with NSW police about the allegations and Amnesty's letter to Scipione.
The police declined to comment, instead providing a written statement about the arrest of two other people that night. The arrests can be seen in the full video below.
"There have been no other comments from police regarding this matter," a spokesperson said.