![]() On September 3, the Bronx District Attorney filed to dismiss the summonses, and on September 25 the Bronx District Attorney’s office informed Human Rights Watch that the desk appearance tickets will also be dismissed. They were given summonses or desk appearance tickets with court dates in early October. Most were charged with Class B misdemeanors for curfew violations or unlawful assembly. Some were released later that night others the next afternoon. Police arrested and took to jail at least 263 people, more than at any other protest in New York since Floyd’s killing. The NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief of Department Terence Monahan, was present during the action, along with at least 24 other uniformed supervisory officers – chiefs, lieutenants, captains, or inspectors in white shirts. Video footage captures an official from the NYPD’s Legal Bureau instructing other officers: “Legal Observers can be arrested.… They are good to go!” ![]() Dozens of people spent hours in detention with untreated wounds and their hands bound behind their backs.Īt least 13 legal observers – who wear clearly identifiable hats and badges – were also detained, in some cases violently, before being released. Most of those injured did not receive any immediate medical care, as police arrested or obstructed volunteer medics in medical scrubs with red cross insignia. Human Rights Watch documented at least 61 cases of protesters, legal observers, and bystanders who sustained injuries during the crackdown, including lacerations, a broken nose, lost tooth, sprained shoulder, broken finger, black eyes, and potential nerve damage due to overly tight zip ties. Somewhere in the process of being cuffed, I had a knee on my neck.” “Then they dragged me on the ground and beat me with batons. “Then another cop sprayed me in the face with mace,” he said. One protester described how an officer punched him in the face while another twisted his finger and broke it. “It was a planned operation with no justification that could cost New York taxpayers millions of dollars.” “The New York City police blocked people from leaving before the curfew and then used the curfew as an excuse to beat, abuse, and arrest people who were protesting peacefully,” said Ida Sawyer, acting crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. Just after 8 p.m., the police, unprovoked and without warning, moved in on the protesters, wielding batons, beating people from car tops, shoving them to the ground, and firing pepper spray into their faces before rounding up more than 250 people for arrest curfew – imposed after looting elsewhere in the city – scores of police officers surrounded and trapped the protesters – a tactic known as “kettling” – as they marched peacefully through Mott Haven. It describes the city’s ineffectual accountability systems that protect abusive police officers, shows the shortcomings of incremental reforms, and makes the case for structural change.Ībout 10 minutes before an 8 p.m. The 99-page report, “ ‘Kettling’ Protesters in the Bronx: Systemic Police Brutality and Its Costs in the United States,” provides a detailed account of the police response to the June 4 peaceful protest in Mott Haven, a low-income, majority Black and brown community that has long experienced high levels of police brutality and systemic racism. Annex II: Letter from the NYPD to Human Rights Watch
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