When the city settled a police brutality lawsuit with Black Lives Matter protesters in 2023, it agreed to limit a notorious NYPD unit’s deployment and ban several controversial crowd-control tactics — but the resolution also mandated the public’s inclusion and input when rolling out such reforms.
As a result, on February 28, the first Protest Testimony Project community roundtable took place to solicit feedback from everyday New Yorkers about how the NYPD responds to First Amendment-protected activities like demonstrations. The event was held in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant community and is likely to be a monthly occurrence.
“One of our main goals with the community engagement work is conducting community roundtables to make sure folks are educated about what’s in the settlement, specifically the new tier engagement structure, and the bans and the use of force constraints, but also just getting experiences from folks that are on the ground about what it’s like to go to protests and their actual experiences,” said Obi Afriyie, a community organizer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “Reports and data only tell one half of the story.
“We’ve seen with a lot of these reports that come out. They’re oftentimes [devoid] of the community input and lived experiences that really can consolidate harms.”
The settlement carved out a role for an independent community engagement expert and demanded someone with deep ties to affected communities to gather input about the reforms through a three-year contract. Afriyie was ultimately tapped for the position last year.
The lawsuit, Payne v. De Blasio, et al., stemmed from the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. A legal superteam, composed of the State Attorney General’s Office and organizations like the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society, represented the plaintiffs, who recounted how officers allegedly brutalized them as they took to New York City streets to call for racial justice.
“I will never forget what I experienced during the summer of 2020: People protesting violence were met with violence, inflicted by NYPD officers on people who they claim to serve and protect,” said plaintiff James Lauren in 2023. “I will never forget that [despite being] a medic in scrubs, I was forcibly detained and prevented from helping the injured. I will never forget feeling like those officers knew that they could do whatever they wanted to us with no consequence, as they’ve done in the past.”
While the city and the other police unions seemed on board, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) unsuccessfully challenged the reforms as a third party. The efforts slowed down the roll-out. As the PBA went back-and-forth with both parties in court, the NYPD deployed the Strategic Response Group (SRG) — a militarized unit with a track record of roughing up protesters — to pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Columbia University’s campus and in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood, which boasts the city’s largest Arab-American community.
Last fall, the settlement finally reached phase two and led to the agreement’s keystone reforms. The NYPD implemented a tiered-response system, restricting the SRG’s deployment to just the highest levels. Kettling, the controversial crowd control tactic of surrounding protesters and preventing them from leaving, was also banned.
The reforms come at a unique time. The settlement only holds local NYPD officers accountable at a time when city protesters often clash with federal immigration enforcement. “I’m still trying to figure out how we’re going to address that,” said Afriyie.
Other roundtables previously took place but were focused on partnering with specific community groups with a more homogeneous audience, compared to Saturday’s event. It should also be noted that policing goes beyond just protests. Afriyie mentioned a roundtable with an East New York youth group, which recalled NYPD presence at cultural celebrations like J’ouvert and the Brooklyn Pride Parade.
“The role of police at First Amendment activities is not to stop the First Amendment activities,” said Afriyie. “It’s to make sure that they can continue to go on in safer ways. There’s got to be a proper chain of escalation for those types of things … It’s also about who is more likely to be targeted by those same escalations [and] whose actions are deemed as being more of a threat.
“Black communities have long felt that outside of protest, celebrations of a culture where there’s just mass groupings of Black people are always shut down in those ways.”
More information can be found at protesttestimonyproject.org.