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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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NYC Mayor and Top NYPD Brass Off the Hook for Protest Brutality

A New York federal judge found that police brutality claims brought against the mayor and top-ranking NYPD leadership in their official capacities are redundant of the municipal claims against the City of New York and granted their motion to dismiss on Friday.

MANHATTAN (CN) — A half-dozen complaints seeking to hold NYPD accountable for violence and brutality during the George Floyd protests last summer can still proceed to a trial next year, a New York federal judge ruled Friday, but dropped individual claims against the city’s mayor and the department's top-ranking officials.

In a 45-page opinion made public on Friday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon let Mayor Bill de Blasio and top NYPD leadership — current commissioner Dermot Shea and former chief Terence Monahan — off the hook in their official capacities for claims of excessive and unnecessary force used by responding officers against nonviolent protesters, journalists and bystanders during the George Floyd civil rights protests that erupted during the summer of 2020.

Chief Judge McMahon, who intends to have the consolidated package of six lawsuits ready for trial in early 2022, found that the claims brought against three individual defendants in their official capacities are redundant of the municipal claims against the city of New York and granted their motion to dismiss.

Representatives for the police department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling Friday afternoon.

“Courts in the Second Circuit routinely dismiss official capacity claims against municipal officials as duplicative of the claims against the municipality,” McMahon noted in her opinion.

The Bill Clinton-appointed judge, however, did not dismiss any claims against the city.

The six lawsuits, including a complaint brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, allege that the NYPD violated the First, Fourth and Fourteen Amendments to the U.S. Constitution in the department’s handling of protests and demonstrations in the city beginning on May 28, 2020, three days after Floyd’s death.

The complaints allege that the NYPD “indiscriminately” deployed pepper spray, batons and used bicycles to batter protesters, along with using the encirclement tactic known as “kettling,” to surround, trap and eventually arrest protesters without first providing a warning or opportunity for them to leave the area.

The lawsuits further allege that officers used force to arrest persons who were observing rather than protesting, including medics in hospital scrubs, journalists with press credentials and legal observers in neon green caps.

The lawsuits assert that such violent responses, are indicative of a widespread pattern of unconstitutional conduct by the department in responding to peaceful protests.

Attorney General James’ 11-count complaint broadens claims to accuse the NYPD of also having unlawfully arrested legal observers, medics and other essential workers without probable cause and in direct violation of an executive order issued by the mayor exempting them from the city’s curfew imposed at the time.

James’ civil suit referred to a scathing report released last December from the New York City Department of Investigation, which found that the NYPD lacked a standardized agency-wide training tailored to respond to the large-scale protests of police and policing.

In 115 pages, the report details “a number of key errors or omissions that likely escalated tensions, and certainly contributed to both the perception and the reality that the Department was suppressing rather than facilitating lawful First Amendment assembly and expression.”

Representatives for the New York Attorney General’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday afternoon.

Brooklyn-based civil rights attorney Gideon Oliver lauded the ruling on Friday, which he said "rejected virtually all of the Defendants’ motion to dismiss our case, recognized we had shown a 'decades-old problem' involving widespread patterns of violating protesters’ constitutional rights, and left our substantive challenges to last summer’s police misconduct — and the City’s related policies and practices — in place."

"Although the Court also dismissed a few of our claims against some of the individual Defendants, it did so because they were essentially duplicative of other policy claims against the City that the Court did not dismiss," Oliver said. "That was in sum administrative housekeeping, not a comment on the strength of our challenges. We look forward to continuing to pursue all of those challenges, and this case, aggressively in the coming months."

Oliver represents more than 50 protesters subjected to kettling during a particularly violent police response last summer at a Black Lives Matter protest in a section of the Bronx called Mott Haven.

In 2014, the city spent $18 million to settle lawsuits related to protests during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Based on the RNC settlements, Human Rights Watch estimates that lawsuits related to the civil rights protests in New York City last year could end up costing the city’s taxpayers several million dollars. 

Earlier this week, the New York Post reported that Monahan, who retired last February, began collecting his $188,280 annual pension in March while also earning a taxpayer-funded $242,592 annual salary as Mayor de Blasio’s new senior adviser, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Law.

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Categories / Civil Rights, Government, Law

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