By now, there should be no doubt that the law enforcement in this country has a serious problem with using excessive force and it’s gotten way out of hand. But in case you needed more evidence…

An off-duty police officer in Prince George’s County, D.C. was brutalized by some of his own on Tuesday when he was walking away from a local mall, where police were responding to reports of a shooting and looking for the suspect.

Robert Parker, a D.C. police officer who was dressed in jeans, a jacket and a hoodie, was leaving the mall and walking down Iverson Street when he was stopped by a P.G. county police officer in a marked cruiser.

Parker says he was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and punched in the head even though he told the officer several times that he was also a cop and obeyed their orders.

“He reaches around and feels my sidearm, my firearm and I look at him and I see the look in his eye and I say, ‘I’m the police.’  I’m literally slammed. I went to the ground I kept saying, ‘I’m the police, I’m the police.’ There were two other officers there. I felt their presence and they placed me in handcuffs, and then somebody hit me in the right side of my face.”

Not surprisingly, the P.G. County police have a different account of what happened. They claim that Parker did not identify himself as a police officer until after he was wrestled to the ground and restrained.

The P.G. County police department is standing behind the officer who attacked Parker, saying in a statement that the officer, a 20-year veteran, acted “professionally and with restraint” and that recorded audio of the incident has been reviewed.

Parker plans to file a formal complaint and feels like the excessive use of force was racially motivated.

“I thought, if I were in another neighborhood, if I were someone else, if the lookout was for a white guy in a hoodie and I was white, I don’t think I would have been approached like that. I think I would have been given a lot more courtesy.”

Unfortunately, this is not the first incident of the police inflicting violence against a Black officer in P.G. County. Jacai Colson, an undercover narcotics detective, was shot by another officer under suspicious circumstances during a confrontation back in March.

Sound off: Do you think “Blue Lives Matter” when the boys in blue are Black? What can be done about the violence on Black police officers and Black citizens in general?