Abner Louima is a Haïtian immigrant who was assaulted and brutalized by New York City police officers after being arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub in 1997.

In 1997, 30-year-old Abner Louima was married, had one child, and had been living in Brooklyn, New York for the previous six years. Although he had trained as an electrical engineer in Haiti, Louima worked as a security guard in a water-and-sewage plant in Flatlands, Brooklyn.