NYC’s police watchdog faces a deadline of May 4th for civilian complaints over the NYPD’s response to the 2020 protests. Staff say it’s struggled to investigate allegations because of a lack of cooperation from police and mistakes made within the agency.
A still from NYPD body-worn camera footage obtained by Gothamist showing officers making an arrest in Downtown Brooklyn during the 2020 racial-justice protests.A still from NYPD body-worn camera footage obtained by Gothamist showing officers making an arrest in Downtown Brooklyn during the 2020 racial-justice protests.The night they were arrested on May 30th, 2020, Camila Gini and her then-boyfriend Andie Mali had hit the streets of Brooklyn in search of vegan food.
“It was the highest-profile moment for police oversight in my lifetime,” said one CCRB investigator, who spoke to Gothamist but did not want to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. The NYPD has denied the allegations of obstruction and say it was dealing with an unprecedented situation in responding to both the protests and the pandemic.To understand how the CCRB investigated complaints arising from the 2020 protests, and what roadblocks they hit along the way, Gothamist interviewed nearly a dozen current and former employees with first-hand knowledge of how protest investigations were conducted.
From the start, Thelwell said, investigators assigned to protest cases reported having trouble identifying members of the NYPD. Many officers could be seen in protest footage covering their shield numbers with black mourning bands, which are typically used to honor fallen officers. Other investigators described videos in which police officers refused to identify themselves when protestors asked for their names and badge numbers.
The result, CCRB staff said, was that many of the officers the agency later interviewed claimed that, once they’d fanned out into a demonstration, they didn't know the other officers they were working alongside and therefore couldn’t identify them in videos – creating what one agency employee described as a “documentary nightmare” on the part of the police department.
“It was fluid. You're talking about cops that were working sometimes 20 hours straight,” Monahan said. “You started to mobilize cops and as soon as you got them there, you were trying to stick them out into rosters, put them into place. So there may have been some issues with doing it.” As for officers wearing the wrong helmets, the department spokesperson said police were faced with a barrage of objects being hurled at them during the protests. “Bricks, batteries, bottles full of known and unknown substances,” the NYPD spokesperson wrote. “Thankfully, situations that require the use of helmets for officer safety are few and far between for the large majority of officers. For this reason, officers typically do not have them at the ready, which led to officers sharing helmets.
“We were saying, ‘Please make it public that the NYPD is not cooperating with giving us these documents for the investigations, and it's hampering the investigations,’” Thelwell said. “We didn't get a straight answer of why we weren't saying anything publicly. We just didn't understand it.” “We had to balance making the public aware of the difficulties we were having investigating cases with being impartial during investigations and not coming to a premature conclusion,” Darche said.
According to a lawsuit later filed in federal court, when the couple tried to lay eyes on what the officers were doing, several of them began to push Mali and strike him with their batons. When Gini stepped in between them to say they were leaving, the complaint alleges that both she and Mali were beaten, forced to the ground and handcuffed.
Tracking the 2020 protests was just as confusing for CCRB investigators. Demonstrations lasted hours. Protesters and officers alike had roamed throughout the city, making it difficult to place people in specific locations at specific points in time. Instead, staff said, investigative squads “caught cases” as they entered the agency’s queue, depending on which teams were up for rotation. As a result, groups of complaints that shared connective threads and locations were scattered across the agency at a time when investigators and other employees were working remotely due to the pandemic, making collaboration even more difficult.
In its place, multiple staff members at the agency said investigators began to share information and collaborate on cases on their own, establishing shared drives for video footage and exchanging visual descriptions of the people they were trying to identify – both officers and protestors – all while working from the isolation of their homes.
“We were having massive protests all over the city simultaneously resulting in police officers taking action against civilians around the city simultaneously,” Darche said. “I want to see these cases move,” the meeting minutes show Darche had said, which was confirmed by others who were present. “Delays in the protest cases – unless there is a good reason for it – will not be tolerated.”
Agency interviews with officers are a key component of closing out CCRB investigations and they’d essentially ground to a halt during the surge of protest cases. As the summer wore on, Darche and other members of the CCRB’s leadership came up with a plan. In mid-July 2020, Chris Duerr, then the agency’s other co-chief of investigations, sent an email to the CCRB’s investigation staff, cc’ing Darche, Thelwell, and the agency’s general counsel, Matthew Kadushin.
“Unbeknownst to us, he went alone to the police department and came back with an agreement that was unfavorable,” Thelwell said. According to multiple staff members, one arrangement would have required agency investigators to rotate their cameras around the room where they were conducting the interviews in their homes to prove no one else was present, a prospect that Thelwell said many investigators found invasive, and that allowing officers and their union reps to turn off their video would have a detrimental impact on investigations.
By late July, Darche had dropped his end-of-August deadline, staff said. A new one – while promised – didn’t materialize until an end to emergency orders placed the new statute of limitations on May 4th. The requirement for investigators to pan their cameras around their homes was never implemented, CCRB staff said.
Former CCRB investigators are old enough to remember a time, not so long ago, when complaints against officers did not revolve around video evidence. But today, according to an agency analysis published just months before the protests swept through the city, access to video evidence more than doubles the CCRB’s ability to substantiate allegations against officers, from 13% in cases with no video evidence, to 31% where video is available.
But the CCRB argues its investigations are hamstrung by the fact that the agency relies on NYPD personnel to conduct searches of the department’s body-cam video database and make decisions for CCRB investigators over what footage is and is not relevant to their cases. Investigators submit request forms to the police department detailing their search parameters and wait to see what they get back.
“They see it as their own property,” said another, former CCRB employee. “And that they get to decide who gets to see this property that they own.”in the wake of the protests stated that the CCRB had over 1,100 pending requests for body-worn camera footage for which the NYPD had provided no response.
The officer whose name was handwritten on Gini’s court summons for disorderly conduct, Zakie Karimzada – who the CCRB report calls “one of the most likely subjects” in the case – claimed in an interview with the investigator that he did not recall being involved in Gini’s arrest in any way. He and two other officers interviewed also told the investigator they did not remember who the highest-ranking officer was on scene at the time and location of the incident.
The NYPD did not respond to multiple questions about why the CCRB does not have direct access to the city’s body-cam database. The NYPD did not respond to questions about how it provides staffing for body-cam requests. In a written statement, a spokesperson said the police department works closely with the CCRB to ensure it receives footage in “a timely fashion.”
As one former employee said, the agency’s role is largely that of a case processor – complaints are received, investigated, and then fed through a vote by the CCRB’s board with what they described as very little attention to actual outcomes. Mott Haven was widely seen by protest organizers and advocacy groups as one of the more egregious examples of an overly aggressive response from the NYPD. Video from the demonstration showed police officers on top of cars, beating protestors with their batons, and other officers shoving civilians with bicycles. Human Rights WatchMany believed Monahan bore responsibility, though he disputes the assertion.
“We might have interviewed more senior officers for the protest cases than in all our past cases combined,” Darche said. Staff complained that the process dragged out for months. Calvo-Platero, the CCRB spokesperson, said that because Monahan eventually became the subject of several civilian complaints – all of which were at different stages of investigation – Darche decided the agency needed ample time to prepare. The agency felt it had only one opportunity to interview Monahan because of his rank in the department.his retirement, at which point he would fall outside the CCRB’s jurisdiction.
“Ultimately, obviously you’re responsible [as department chief], but you have to allow people to make decisions. And he made a decision and he justified it,” Monahan said. “Many decisions are made in the heat of the moment. You have a second to make that decision one way or another, what you’re going to do, and then you have to live with the decision you make.”
New York City’s police-oversight system hands final authority over whether officers actually face discipline or not over to the police commissioner. The CCRB’s findings are just “recommendations” that the commissioner oftenSo far, the NYPD’s concurrence rate for abiding by the CCRB’s findings in 2020 protest cases where officers faced serious charges is just 42% – meaning more than half received no discipline from either Commissioner Keechant Sewell or her predecessor, Dermot Shea.
For years, the CCRB’s leadership has called for the city to hand final disciplinary authority over to the agency – which Commissioner Sewell opposes, according to a written statement from NYPD spokesperson, Jessica McRorie.