Plain Old Justice

   Lawsuit Alleges 4 Decades of Police Violence in Rochester, New York

By K. W. Locke

    Ten individuals and two organizations have filed a class action lawsuit against the City of Rochester, New York, Monroe County, New York, and a number of government officials.  The 96-page complaint alleges a pattern of civil rights violations.  It describes a 40–year struggle to make the police department accountable.

    In 1975, a white police officer killed an 18-year-old black women.  Public protests prompted the creation of a “Citizens Committee on Police Affairs,” which recommended reforms.

    But the next victim was the 21-year-old daughter of a member of the citizens committee.   During a domestic dispute, she told her young son to go to a cousin’s home and ask the cousin to call the police.  The police came.  The young mother died.

    The complaint alleges that by 1990 three more people had died and that one of them “was shot five times at close range while cowering, unarmed, in a crawl space in his own apartment.”

    In 1991, a local newspaper ran a multipart series detailing, in the complaint’s words, “the disproportionate use of force against Black and Hispanic people.”  The newspaper reported that during the previous year, 852 people had been injured during encounters with the police.

    The next year, a federal grand jury indicted Rochester’s former police chief and five subordinates for “wide-ranging brutality and corruption” by members of the police “Highway Interdiction Team” or “HIT squad.”   Although the former chief entered a guilty plea, other officers did not and were acquitted.

    But after the police chief’s guilty plea, city leaders should have known that there was a serious problem.  They also had other clues.

    For instance, the city paid $625,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a man framed by HIT squad officers.  He had spent 2 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

    The city also “paid over $200,000 in settlements,” the class action complaint alleges, “for at least ten civil rights suits brought by victims of the HIT squad’s brutality.”

    In 1992, the Rochester city council did create a civilian review board, but gave it no authority to subpoena witnesses, conduct investigations, or impose discipline.   Nothing changed.

    An incident 10 years later involved a mentally ill man running around a parking lot in his underwear.  He wasn’t armed.  He was black.

    Rochester officers tackled, pepper sprayed him, clubbed him, and one cop stood on his neck.   They also pepper sprayed a bystander filming the incident with a cellphone.  The man died.

    The class action complaints list other instances when people - people of color - died from encounters with the police.  The NAACP organized protests.  Demonstrators marched on city hall.  Nothing changed.  Some of the officers received promotions.

    It would take up too much space to describe all the instances of police misconduct alleged in the 96-page complaint.  So fast forward to March 23,  2020.   A young black man was suffering a mental health crisis and his family called the police for help.

    The man was Daniel Prude, one of the named plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit.   The complaint stated that his family’s call for help ended “with Daniel naked and handcuffed with his face covered by a ‘spit hood,’ as an RPD officer pushed his head into the freezing asphalt. . .RPD officers on the scene mocked Daniel and chatted with each other while he asphyxiated. Daniel was declared brain dead that night; he was taken off life support and died on March 30.”

    The police did not release video of the incident until September 2, 2020.  The release prompted large demonstrations on that night and the next.

    According to the complaint officers acted violently towards peaceful protesters.   It describes instances in which police shot pepper balls at “photojournalists, legal observers and people who were recording officers.”   The complaint includes photographs showing injuries inflicted by pepper balls or by a tear gas cannister.   It also incorporates by reference a video shot by one individual who was hit.  
 

    Notwithstanding the demonstrations, it appears that little has changed in the Rochester police department.  As this blog recently reported, earlier this year Rochester police officers handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a 9-year-old girl.