NYPD Blatant Abuses During 2020 Protests

When police vio­late the rights of cit­i­zens in the United States, the cit­i­zen is forced to report the abuse at the sta­tion house to which the offend­ing offi­cers are attached, or not at all. In most cas­es, as report­ed by indi­vid­u­als and groups who have test­ed this process, the per­son report­ing abuse by police is treat­ed with dis­dain, threats, and intim­ida­to­ry tac­tics. In oth­er cas­es, peo­ple are lied to and even arrest­ed on trumped-up charges as they try to make a complaint.
In cas­es where there is a civil­ian com­plaint review board, it is almost point­less report­ing to them; as you will see with the review board in New York City, it is tooth­less and total­ly useless.
Officers get to decide whether or not they want to attend inter­views relat­ing to their mis­con­duct, regard­less of the seri­ous­ness of the alle­ga­tions against them. And even in cas­es where the alle­ga­tions are thor­ough­ly inves­ti­gat­ed and are sub­stan­ti­at­ed, the Review Board can only pass on the find­ings to the depart­ment for action.
The Review Board has no way of know­ing whether the depart­ment act­ed on the findings.
This is what pass­es for police account­abil­i­ty in the United States. Police depart­ments and their rogue ele­ments are unac­count­able and above the law.(mb)

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A new­ly released report from the city agency that inves­ti­gates com­plaints of police mis­con­duct crit­i­cizes the NYPD for fail­ing to prop­er­ly track where offi­cers were deployed dur­ing the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. It also says the depart­ment did not request enough sup­port from emer­gency med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, and did not equip offi­cers with riot gear that made it easy for them to be identified.

The police watch­dog agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, pub­lished the near­ly 600-page doc­u­ment Monday. It details its review of hun­dreds of com­plaints against offi­cers who respond­ed to the protests in 2020 after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd.

The agency received a bar­rage of offi­cer com­plaints fol­low­ing city-wide demon­stra­tions between May and November of that year. Investigators weren’t able to con­duct a full review of many of those com­plaints. Of the cas­es the agency did review ful­ly, it found that at least 146 mem­bers of ser­vice who respond­ed to the protests vio­lat­ed depart­ment rules. Officers broke NYPD pol­i­cy in about 40% of the cas­es it was able to ful­ly inves­ti­gate, the report says.

In more than a quar­ter of full inves­ti­ga­tions, the agency couldn’t iden­ti­fy the offi­cer at the cen­ter of the com­plaint, mak­ing it impos­si­ble to rec­om­mend dis­ci­pline. Overall, the police depart­ment, which has the final say on dis­ci­pline, has only imposed dis­ci­pline against 42 offi­cers so far. Dozens of cas­es are still pending.

Among the inci­dents detailed: On Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, two police cruis­ers drove through a crowd of pro­test­ers. In Lower Manhattan, offi­cers alleged­ly hit peo­ple with batons so hard that they caused bone frac­tures. Police spewed pep­per spray indis­crim­i­nate­ly into a crowd out­side the Barclays Center. They sur­round­ed demon­stra­tors in Mott Haven, arrest­ed them and alleged­ly zip tied some pro­test­ers’ hands so tight­ly that they went numb. One sergeant pushed a pho­to­jour­nal­ist to the ground, caus­ing scrapes to his arms, legs and cheeks and $800 in dam­age to his camera.

In a state­ment, a spokesper­son for the NYPD not­ed that the num­ber of offi­cers who faced a sub­stan­ti­at­ed com­plaint rep­re­sents less than 1% of the of 22,000 mem­bers of ser­vice who respond­ed to the protests. “This con­firms that the NYPD response to the protests dur­ing the sum­mer of 2020 was large­ly pro­fes­sion­al, com­mend­able, and respon­sive to the unique cir­cum­stances that were present at the time,” the state­ment said. In a let­ter to CCRB lead­er­ship, NYPD Acting Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters Carrie Talanksy accused the CCRB of bas­ing its find­ings on “lim­it­ed infor­ma­tion” and failed to acknowl­edge that offi­cers were work­ing in “hos­tile and adver­sar­i­al con­di­tions.” She not­ed that more than 400 offi­cers were injured and about 250 were hos­pi­tal­ized. She said the over­sight agency “arti­fi­cial­ly inflates the data pre­sent­ed to the NYPD’s detri­ment,” and said the depart­ment has already tak­en action in some of the cas­es out­lined in the report and has imple­ment­ed rec­om­men­da­tions from the Department of Investigation.

The watch­dog agency had planned to share its find­ings in mid-2022, but the pub­li­ca­tion date was repeat­ed­ly delayed as the agency strug­gled to keep up with an unprece­dent­ed num­ber of com­plaints against offi­cers who were often unnamed.

A cas­cade of exter­nal road­blocks and inter­nal fail­ures stalled inves­ti­ga­tions into those com­plaints. Officers declined to par­tic­i­pate in vir­tu­al inter­views at the height of the pan­dem­ic, requests for body cam­era footage turned up irrel­e­vant videos and illeg­i­ble per­son­nel ros­ters made it near­ly impos­si­ble to iden­ti­fy the swath of offi­cers who were deployed out­side of their nor­mal precincts dur­ing the days of protests across the city. Many offi­cers cov­ered their shield num­bers to hide their iden­ti­ties from pro­test­ers who might lat­er file a complaint.

A Gothamist inves­ti­ga­tion found that many CCRB employ­ees had been sound­ing the alarms for months, urg­ing the agency to speak up ear­li­er about the chal­lenges it was fac­ing. Staff told Gothamist that the agency also failed to team up inves­ti­ga­tors in a way that would have made it eas­i­er for them to share evi­dence and collaborate.

A staffing short­age in the CCRB unit that han­dles the most seri­ous cas­es has also cre­at­ed a back­log for admin­is­tra­tive tri­als against offi­cers who have been charged with pol­i­cy vio­la­tions. More than 60 of those cas­es are unresolved.

Other groups have already doc­u­ment­ed wide­spread issues with the NYPD’s response to the 2020 demon­stra­tions. A Department of Investigation report found police used “exces­sive tac­tics” and a Human Rights Watch report called the police response to a protest in Mott Haven “inten­tion­al, planned, and unjustified.”

The CCRB report zeroes in on indi­vid­ual alle­ga­tions against offi­cers, the out­comes of the agency’s inves­ti­ga­tions and the pun­ish­ments that offi­cers did — or didn’t — face.

“Protests against police bru­tal­i­ty bred more instances of police mis­con­duct,” CCRB Chair Arva Rice wrote in the report. “If this mis­con­duct goes unad­dressed, it will nev­er be reformed.”

The report high­lights some of the agency’s most com­mon find­ings against offi­cers, includ­ing that many offi­cers vio­lat­ed NYPD guide­lines when they struck civil­ians with batons, improp­er­ly used pep­per spray against peace­ful pro­test­ers and used exces­sive phys­i­cal force to push and shove peo­ple. Multiple offi­cers also failed to pro­vide med­ical care to peo­ple with injuries, didn’t turn on their body cam­eras dur­ing some inter­ac­tions that should have been record­ed, or placed bands on their shields to hide their num­bers and refused to tell peo­ple their names.

Here are some oth­er key takeaways:

Case out­comes:

• The CCRB received more than 750 com­plaints, 321 of which fell with­in the CCRB’s juris­dic­tion. (The CCRB is only allowed to inves­ti­gate a few types of mis­con­duct: force, abuse of author­i­ty, dis­cour­tesy and offen­sive lan­guage. The agency also launched a new unit to inves­ti­gate claims of racial pro­fil­ing and bias-based polic­ing last year.)
• The agency was able to ful­ly inves­ti­gate 226 of those complaints.
• The CCRB deter­mined that offi­cers had vio­lat­ed pol­i­cy in 88com­plaints.
• Investigators were unable to deter­mine the sus­pect­ed officer’s iden­ti­ty in 59 complaints.
• The agency was unable to deter­mine if mis­con­duct had occurred in 50 complaints.
• Officers were found to have fol­lowed NYPD guide­lines in just 18 of the 321 complaints.
• The agency found that the alleged mis­con­duct did not occur in 11 cases
• The CCRB sub­stan­ti­at­ed 269 alle­ga­tions of mis­con­duct against 146mem­bers of ser­vice (Sometimes com­plaints include mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent alle­ga­tions of wrong­do­ing. The agency also notes that it count­ed offi­cers more than once in this tal­ly if they had mul­ti­ple com­plaints with sub­stan­ti­at­ed misconduct.)
• The sub­stan­ti­at­ed alle­ga­tions include: 140 claims of exces­sive force, 72 claims of abuse of author­i­ty, 24 claims of untruth­ful state­ments, 24 claims of dis­cour­tesy and 9 claims of offen­sive language.
• The NYPD has final­ized 78 cas­es and has imposed dis­ci­pline in 42of them.

Main obsta­cles dur­ing investigations: