At the height of the recent Black Lives Matter marches in New York City, the police were repeatedly recorded using force against protesters. The department said it exercised restraint. This is what the videos show.
It was two hours after curfew on the sixth night of protests against police brutality in New York City.
An officer in Brooklyn pushed a protester so hard that she fell backward on the pavement. Then he shoved someone on a bicycle and picked up and body-slammed a third person into the street.
Nearby, a man fell running from the police. Officers swarmed him and beat him with batons. A commanding officer, in his white-shirted uniform, joined the fray and stepped on the man’s neck.
All of it was caught on video. In fact, the New York Times found more than 60 videos that show the police using force on protesters during the first 10 days of demonstrations in the city after the death of George Floyd.
A review of the videos, shot by protesters and journalists, suggests that many of the police attacks, often led by high-ranking officers, were not warranted.
A video of five or 10 or 30 seconds does not tell the whole story, of course. It does not depict what happened before the camera started rolling. It is unclear from the videos, for instance, what the officers’ intentions were or why protesters were being arrested or told to move.
But the Police Department’s patrol guide says officers may use “only the reasonable force necessary to gain control or custody of a subject.” Force, policing experts say, must be proportionate to the threat or resistance at hand at the moment it is applied.
In instance after instance, the police are seen using force on people who do not appear to be resisting arrest or posing an immediate threat to anyone.
Punches, tackles, beatings and shoves.
Officers attacked people who had their hands up.
They hit people who were walking away from them.
They grabbed people from behind.
And they repeatedly pummeled people who were already on the ground.
Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea has maintained that misconduct during the protests was confined to “isolated cases” and that officers were confronted with violence by protesters.
He noted that during the first week of demonstrations, people looted businesses, burned police cars and attacked officers with bricks, bottles and in one case a fire extinguisher. The unrest prompted Mayor Bill de Blasio to impose an 8 p.m. curfew.
Yet for just about each viral moment that emerged from the protests — officers violently shoving a woman to the ground or beating a cyclist who seemed to be doing nothing more than trying to cross the street — The Times turned up multiple examples of similar behavior.
The police responded to words with punches and pepper spray.
Officers charged into peaceful crowds and pushed people to the ground.
Sometimes, they appeared to lash out at random.
Devora Kaye, the Police Department’s assistant commissioner for public information, declined repeated requests to review the full set of videos provided by The Times and to explain the use of force in them.
She reiterated that “isolated incidents” of misconduct were being addressed, noted that four officers had already been disciplined, and said that the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau was investigating 51 cases of use of force during the protests.
“The N.Y.P.D. has zero tolerance for inappropriate or excessive use of force,” she wrote, “but it is also critical to review the totality of the circumstances that lead to interactions where force is used.”
The police said that nearly 400 officers were injured during the protests, and that 132 of the more than 2,500 people arrested reported injuries, but that they did not have records of injured people who were not arrested. Protesters have described and documented at least five broken or fractured bones and four concussions.
The Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents most N.Y.P.D. officers, declined to comment on the videos.
The episodes in the videos The Times reviewed were spread across 15 neighborhoods in three boroughs. Several videos each were taken June 3 in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn and on June 4 in Mott Haven in the Bronx, when officers “kettled” protesters into tight spaces and then beat them with batons.
Philip M. Stinson, a Bowling Green State University criminologist and former police officer who studies the use of force by the police, offered a blunt assessment of the behavior shown in these videos. “A lot of this was ‘street justice,’” he said, “gratuitous acts of extrajudicial violence doled out by police officers on the street to teach somebody a lesson.”
Sometimes, the police went after people already in custody.
Sometimes officers went after people they did not appear interested in arresting at all.
Mr. Stinson said that in some of the videos, the police used force permissibly. He saw nothing inappropriate, for example, in this widely viewed video of officers using batons on people who appeared to be trying to evade arrest.
Scott Hechinger, a public defender for nearly a decade in Brooklyn, said he found it striking that being filmed by crowds of protesters did not seem to inhibit some officers’ conduct.
“That the police were able and willing to perform such brazen violence when surrounded by cellphone cameras and when the whole world was watching at this moment more than any other, underscores how police feel and know they will never be held to account in any meaningful way even for the most egregious acts of violence,” Mr. Hechinger said.
Many of the videos show violence led by officers in white shirts, signaling a rank of lieutenant or higher.
In Manhattan on June 2, one commander shoved a protester and another pulled her down by the hair.
A civil rights lawyer with the legal aid group the Bronx Defenders, Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, said “The primary question is whether the force is reasonable, but you have to remember, if they’re not arresting someone, they shouldn’t be using any force,” Ms. Borchetta said.
At several protests, the police used bicycles as weapons.
Two officers lift their bicycles and push them repeatedly into a group of people, knocking one person over.More often, they used their hands.
he protests, and the outcry over the policing of them, have already led to changes. State legislators overturned a law that kept police discipline records secret and New York City cut its police budget and broadened a ban on chokeholds. Last week, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, called for an independent commission to permanently oversee the Police Department.
But acts of force by the police are still being caught on video, more than six weeks into the protests.
Axel Hernandez, a high school teacher in New York City who on June 3 filmed an officer throwing someone down by the neck, said he felt it was important to continue to keep watch over the police.
“Part of the reason we’re out here is because they were on George Floyd’s neck,” said Mr. Hernandez, 30. “This is exactly why we are protesting in the first place.”