Former Marine Confronts NYPD During Protest - "These are unarmed people!" (VIDEO)

By KRISTINA WONG (@kristina_wong) and GILLIAN MOHNEY
ABC News via Yahoo

When retired Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas saw New York police officers strike Occupy Wall Street protestors with a baton Saturday night, he was furious.

"Protestors were shouting things like, 'Police come join us!'," Thomas recalled in an interview with ABCNews.com. Instead, the police started moving closer and closer to the crowd. Soon, pushing and shoving started.

"I saw a woman and a man getting hit with a baton. That infuriated me," he said. This prompted him to unleash verbal fury on stunned police officers, who stared at him blankly as he shouted to them repeatedly,

"These are unarmed people. It doesn't make you tough to hurt these people."

Thomas' plea, captured on video by Jannah Handy, Thomas' aunt and an Occupy Wall Street protester, has already garnered more than 750,000 hits.

That wasn't the first time he saw violence break out during the protests. The first time he went to a protest was October 5. He had taken a video then, while he was trying to reason with the NYPD.

"When I was there on October 5, I took a video that was posted before this [most recent one]. I tried to reason with NYPD, but they weren't taking me seriously, they weren't really receptive," he said. But he said on Saturday, they were "going to have to hear my voice. I wasn't going to hold any punches this time."

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