NY police chief apologizes to arrest ex-tennis star

'100 PERCENT COOPERATE'

Blake added that he had cooperated throughout the incident with the officers, who did not immediately identify themselves as law enforcement.

"The first words out of my mouth were, 'I'm going to 100 percent cooperate. I don't want any incident or whatever,' just out of reaction from what I've seen in the media,'" said Blake, who was on his way on Wednesday to the U.S. Open, which is being played at Flushing Meadows in the borough of Queens.

Bratton said Blake had been mistakenly identified as a suspect by a witness, adding he did not believe race influenced how he was treated by white officers.

"This rush to put a race tag on it, I'm sorry, that's not involved in this incident at all," Bratton told reporters. "That doesn't denote there's a racial angle to this at all."

The police department last year promised to revamp how it trained officers after 43-year-old Eric Garner died after being placed in a chokehold by officers who were trying to arrest him for suspected illegal cigarette sales on Staten Island in July 2014.

Garner's death was one of a string of cases in the past year involving the deaths of black men in confrontations with police - including in Baltimore, Cleveland and Ferguson, Missouri - that sparked a national debate over race and justice.

Federal data show that US police routinely use force when making stops of pedestrians, doing so in one out of every four non-traffic stops, according to a 2013 Justice Department report.

Some 57 percent of black respondents in a Pew Research Center poll last year said police do a poor job of using the right amount of force when they respond to situations, more than double the 22 percent of white respondents who reported that view.

That poll, of 1,501 US adults, including 1,082 white adults and 153 black adults, was conducted in August 2014, days after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The margin of error for white respondents was 3.4 percentage points and for black respondents 9.1 percentage points.