Last Thursday, Jan. 23, Councilmember Chi Ossé reintroduced the CURB Act, which would stop the NYPD from deploying the militarized Strategic Response Group (SRG) to protests and other First Amendment-protected activity.
The unit gained scrutiny after overly aggressive responses to demonstrations like the George Floyd uprisings in 2020 and the pro-Palestinian campus sit-ins last year.
“The right to assembly and protest is enshrined clearly in the First Amendment of the Constitution,” said Ossé during last Thursday’s city council meeting. “The NYPD’s Strategic Response Group has proven consistently to violate that right. This bill would restrict their ability to do so…all New Yorkers deserve to exercise their right to protest and assemble, and they deserve to exercise this right with safety and dignity.”
New York Civil Liberties Union policy assistant director Michael Sisitzky and senior organizer Isabelle Leyva, who Ossé credited for partnership on the bill, told the Amsterdam News that the legislation is just one avenue police reformers are pursuing to dismantle the unit.
“This is a militarized unit that has access to tools and military-style crowd control tactics that we don’t see used by the general NYPD,” said Leyva. “So we launched this campaign to disband them, to actually remove their funds from the NYPD budget and to reinvest those funds into our communities. And that fight continues, we’ll continue pushing to disband the SRG.
“But… units get disbanded in name all the time and then they just pop up and are called something else. Part of what this legislation [hopes] to accomplish is to prevent that from happening by actually targeting the tactics of the SRG and the things that they’re known to do.”
The bill would also prohibit the NYPD’s use of tear gas, pepper spray, and sound cannons for crowd control purposes, as well as kettling, the tactic of surrounding and containing protesters often employed during the 2020 demonstrations. Crowd control use of bikes, which are a primary kettling tool for the SRG, would also be stopped.
“These are some of the most common abuses from the SRG,” said Sisitzky. “It’s great to make sure the SRG is not deployed at protests. We also need to make sure that there are prohibitions against the deployment of the SRG tactics at protests, regardless of which NYPD officer or unit is responding. And that’s what’s covered in legislation — making sure that we are not letting those abuses carry forward.”
To be clear, the SRG is not limited to policing protests. Little is publicly known about the extent of the responsibilities of the unit, which started as a counterterrorism outfit around a decade ago. The NYPD website says mobilizations range from protests and the Pope’s visit to shootings and bank robberies. Notably, several SRG officers were involved in the 2018 killing of Black New Yorker Saheed Vassell.
“It is not clear what the SRG does outside of protests and the things that we know that they say to do, like counter terrorism efforts, those are things that are already done by several other dedicated units in the NYPD.” said Leyva. “There is nothing new that the SRG does that isn’t already taken care of by other units besides protests. So if we remove them from that space, then there really is no justification for spending $133 million on this unit per year.”
The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
There are so many aspects of the NYPD about which to be disgusted (listen to Empire City podcast series by Chenjerai Kumanyika to learn how we got here and just how nasty ‘here’ is). SRG is a particularly ignoble group of power-hungry, roided-up, violent punks. Stormtrooper Reactionary Goons would be a more apt description of these cowards, whose literal job is to wait for their fellow New Yorkers to “step out of line,” cosplay in the gear from military units in which they were not deemed fit to serve, and crack our skulls. Such a stain. Along with being disbanded, they should pay all their outstanding abuse claims from their ‘benevolent’ fund and individual savings, return their overtime earnings, and have their pensions scrapped. Truly the worst of the worst.