There are a lot of different ways to view this one... More than enough to write a book on.
There's the optics, history (recent and not-so-recent), double-standards, racism, societal inequality... Lots going on there.
In this situation, it would have been wiser to have one officer hold the reigns while the other walked the guy. Of course, if the criminal were white, people would have cheered the same image and that's racism, too.