⁂'Seismic shift' in policing
NYPD Commissioner Shea hailed the disbanding of the police department's plainclothes Anti-crime Unit this month as a "seismic shift in the culture of how NYPD polices this great city." While the elite unit was credited with taking numerous guns off the streets, it became a symbol of the aggressive police tactics and officer-involved shootings that protests sweeping New York and the nation keep railing against. The unit also had a disproportionate number of complaints against it registered with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent police watchdog group empowered to investigate grievances filed against NYPD officers and recommend disciplinary action.
"I would consider this in the realm of closing one of the last chapters of 'Stop, Question and Frisk,'" Shea said. "I think it's time to move forward and change how we police in this city. We can do it with brains. We can do it with guile. We can move away from brute force."
On Friday, de Blasio said he supports Shea's decision, explaining that the NYPD can replace the Anti-crime Unit with technology, precision policing and "not have the negative of some of the concerns that have been raised by the community."
He also praised Shea's swift action by suspending without pay an officer caught on video this month using a banned chokehold on Ricky Bellevue, a 35-year-old Black man who had allegedly been heckling him and his colleagues. The officer, David Afanador, allegedly had to be pulled off Bellevue by a colleague.
Afanador has since been charged with felony strangulation and attempted strangulation. He has pleaded not guilty.
"That's the way things need to be: fast, clear disciplinary process, clear accountability. That's what we'll do going forward," said de Blasio, who has made a commitment to cutting the NYPD budget and redistributing those funds to community-based nonprofit youth and social services programs.
Bellevue's sister-in-law, Judith Ceno, said at a news conference on Friday that Bellevue was so traumatized by the incident he's checked himself into a hospital for a mental evaluation.
⁂Socioeconomic effects on the arrest rate
In the aftermath of the May 25 police-involved death of George Floyd, a handcuffed Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on the back of his neck -- an incident captured on video -- protests and violence have broken out across the country. Fueled by numerous accounts of police disproportionately arresting or using deadly force on Black citizens, demonstrators have demanded police departments reform their use-of-force policies and have pushed to defund law enforcement agencies.
"The movement, in general, is needed to awaken so many minds to the systemic racism that's been happening for years," Lizzy Ashleigh, a member of the Black Lives Matter movement from Brooklyn, New York, told ABC News following the death of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man who was fatally shot in the back by a white Atlanta police officer.
On June 12, Brooks was found allegedly asleep in his car in a Wendy's drive-thru. He was about to be arrested for drunken driving when, during a scuffle, he grabbed an officer's stun gun and ran, deploying the device at an officer chasing him but missing, according to police body-camera and surveillance video released by prosecutors. As the 27-year-old Brooks continued to run, an officer, Garrett Rolfe, opened fire with his handgun, hitting him twice in the back and then allegedly kicking Brooks as he lay dying on the ground, according to prosecutors.
Like Chauvin, Rolfe was fired from the police department and charged with murder.
"In the same respect where so many Black people have been saying for so long, ‘Hey, we’ve told you that we’ve suffered more abuse at the hands of police than our white counterparts,' society is finally realizing that by virtue of seeing these videos," Kirk Burkhalter, a professor at New York Law School and a former NYPD detective, told ABC News.
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