[Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on what
was sold as a revolution in transparency and accountability. Instead,
police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even when
officers kill.]
[[link removed]]

HOW POLICE HAVE UNDERMINED THE PROMISE OF BODY CAMERAS  
[[link removed]]


 

Eric Umansky, with additional reporting by Umar Farooq
December 14, 2023
Propublica, co-published with The New York Times Magazine
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on what
was sold as a revolution in transparency and accountability. Instead,
police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even when
officers kill. _

Richards’ death marked a historic turning point. It was the first
time a killing by officers was recorded by a body camera in New York.
, Still from NYPD body cam

 

_ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign
up for The Big Story newsletter
[[link removed]]
to receive stories like this one in your inbox_.

When Barbara and Belvett Richards learned that the police had killed
their son, they couldn’t understand it. How, on that September day
in 2017, did their youngest child come to be shot in his own apartment
by officers from the New York Police Department?

Miguel Richards, who was 31, grew up in Jamaica and had moved to New
York about a year earlier after coming to the United States through a
work-study program. His father’s friend gave him a job doing office
work, and he rented a room in the Bronx. But he started to struggle,
becoming reclusive and skipping days of work. His mother, with whom he
was particularly close, pleaded with him to return to Jamaica.
“It’s as if I sensed something was going to happen,” she says.
“I was calling him, calling him, calling him: ‘Miguel, come home.
Come home.’”

His parents knew he had never been violent, had never been arrested
and had never had any issues with the police. What details they
managed to gather came from the Bronx district attorney: Richards’
landlord, who hadn’t seen him for weeks, asked the police to check
on him. The officers who responded found Richards standing still in
his own bedroom, holding a small folding knife. And 15 minutes later,
they shot him.

Richards’ death marked a historic turning point. It was the first
time a killing by officers was recorded by a body camera in New York.
The new program was announced just months before as heralding a new
era of accountability. Now, a week after the shooting, the department
posted on its website a compilation of footage from four of the
responding officers. The video, the department said in an introduction
to the presentation, was produced “for clear viewing of the event as
a totality.” And as far as the department was concerned, the
narrative was clear. Sometimes “the use of deadly force is
unavoidable,” the police commissioner at the time, James O’Neill,
wrote in an internal message. The level of restraint shown by all
officers, he said, is “nothing short of exceptional.” And, he
added, “releasing footage from critical incidents like this will
help firmly establish your restraint in the use of force.”

Richards’ parents were not convinced. Belvett watched footage at the
district attorney’s office. What he saw, and what was released, did
not, in fact, show that the use of deadly force was unavoidable. He
later learned that the department had not released all the footage.
What else didn’t they know about their son’s death?

When body-worn cameras were introduced a decade ago, they seemed to
hold the promise of a revolution. Once police officers knew they were
being filmed, surely they would think twice about engaging in
misconduct. And if they crossed the line, they would be held
accountable: The public, no longer having to rely on official
accounts, would know about wrongdoing. Police and civilian oversight
agencies would be able to use footage to punish officers and improve
training. In an outlay that would ultimately cost hundreds of millions
of dollars, the technology represented the largest new investment in
policing in a generation.

Yet without deeper changes, it was a fix bound to fall far short of
those hopes. In every city, the police ostensibly report to mayors and
other elected officials. But in practice, they have been given wide
latitude
[[link removed]]
to run their departments as they wish and to police — and protect
— themselves. And so as policymakers rushed to equip the police with
cameras, they often failed to grapple with a fundamental question: Who
would control the footage? Instead, they defaulted to leaving police
departments, including New York’s, with the power to decide what is
recorded, who can see it and when. In turn, departments across the
country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only
partial or redacted video or refused to release it at all. They have
frequently failed to discipline or fire officers when body cameras
document abuse and have kept footage from the agencies charged with
investigating police misconduct.

Even when departments have stated policies of transparency, they
don’t always follow them. Three years ago, after George Floyd’s
killing by Minneapolis police officers and amid a wave of protests
against police violence, the New York Police Department said
[[link removed]]
it would publish footage of so-called critical incidents “within 30
days.” There have been 380 such incidents since then. The department
has released footage within a month just twice.

And the department often does not release video at all. There have
been 28 shootings of civilians this year by New York officers (through
the first week of December). The department has released footage in
just seven of these cases (also through the first week of December)
and has not done so in any of the last 16.

Asked about the department’s limited release of footage, a
spokesperson pointed to a caveat, contained in an internal order
[[link removed]],
that footage can be withheld because of laws or department policy.
“The NYPD remains wholly committed to its policy of releasing such
recordings as quickly and responsibly as circumstances and the law
dictate,” the spokesperson wrote. “Though transparency is of the
utmost importance, so too is the Police Department’s commitment to
preserving privacy rights.” The department did not say which
policies require the withholding of footage and did not address other
questions about its record on the cameras. (Mayor Eric Adams’
spokesperson did not make him available for comment.)

For a snapshot of disclosure practices across the country, we
conducted a review of civilians killed by police officers in June
2022, roughly a decade after the first body cameras were rolled out.
We counted 79 killings in which there was body-worn-camera footage. A
year and a half later, the police have released footage in just 33
cases — or about 42%.

This article is the product of more than six months spent
investigating how the police have undermined the promise of
transparency and accountability that accompanied the body-camera
movement. We interviewed dozens of department insiders, government
lawyers, policing experts and advocates and reviewed hundreds of pages
of internal reports, obtained through Freedom of Information requests,
and dozens of hours of surveillance-camera and body-camera footage,
including some that the New York Police Department fought against
disclosing. The reporting reveals that without further intervention
from city, state and federal officials and lawmakers, body cameras may
do more to serve police interests than those of the public they are
sworn to protect.

To Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is now a professor at
the Joseph F. Rice School of Law at the University of South Carolina,
body cameras represent the latest chapter in America’s quest for a
technological fix to the deeply rooted problem of unchecked state
power. “Dash cams were supposed to solve racial profiling,” he
says. “Tasers and pepper spray were supposed to solve undue force.
We have this real, almost pathological draw to ‘silver bullet’
syndrome. And I say that as a supporter of body-worn cameras.” He
later added, “We just said to police departments: ‘Here’s this
tool. Figure out how you would like to use it.’ It shouldn’t be a
surprise that they’re going to use it in a way that most benefits
them.”

Jeff Schlanger, a former New York deputy commissioner who had an
oversight role during the implementation of body-worn cameras and left
the department in 2021, believes that the police have often failed to
use the cameras for accountability and that political leaders need to
do more. “Mayors, City Council members, all locally elected
officials,” he says, “should be losing sleep over the lack of
meaningful independent oversight of the police.”

When full footage has been released, often by prosecutors or after
public pressure, it often contradicts initial police accounts. In
2015, a white officer in Cincinnati killed a Black man during a
traffic stop. The officer said his life was in danger. But his
body-camera video showed that was a lie, and he was prosecuted for
murder. (Charges were dropped after two mistrials.) And in
Philadelphia this August, an officer shot and killed a man after, the
police said, he lunged at officers with “a weapon.” In fact,
footage released by the district attorney — who charged the officer
with murder — shows that the man was sitting in his own car.

In New York, Miguel Richards’ parents weren’t the only ones who
had doubts about the department’s claims that the shooting was
unavoidable. The footage the department released stopped right when
the officers fired at Richards. It didn’t include the minutes after
the shooting, and it didn’t include footage from other police units
that responded.

Ruth Lowenkron, a disability rights lawyer who specializes in mental
health issues, wanted to see it all. Working for New York Lawyers for
the Public Interest, a legal-advocacy nonprofit, she and her
colleagues, along with activists, had begun pushing the city to find
an alternative to using the police as first responders to people in
crisis. On her second day on the job, a sergeant shot and killed a
66-year-old woman who had schizophrenia and was holding a baseball bat
in her Bronx apartment. The department’s own investigators concluded
that the sergeant escalated the situation and caused the shooting.

Now, watching the video the department released of Richards’
shooting, Lowenkron feared that the same thing happened to him. The
department’s edited footage showed the officers making a few
attempts to connect with Richards early in the encounter. “What’s
your name, man?” one officer asked. But they were also barking
increasingly terse commands. “You are seconds away from getting
shot,” one officer said. “Do you want to die?” A few minutes
later, as one of them warned that Richards might have a gun, the
officers fired.

Lowenkron filed a records request, certain that there was more to the
story. In releasing the partial footage, the police commissioner had
vowed that the “NYPD is committed to being as transparent as
possible.” But nearly three weeks after her request, Lowenkron
received a different message from one of the department’s records
officers: “I must deny access to these records.”

BODY-WORN CAMERAS were adopted by police departments across the
country in the wake of widespread Black Lives Matter protests in 2014,
sparked when Michael Brown was killed by the police in Ferguson,
Missouri. The officer who shot Brown was not equipped with a camera,
and there was a dispute about what happened in the last moments of
Brown’s life. Amid deep schisms over race, justice and policing,
there was at least agreement that police interactions should be
recorded. Brown’s mother pressed for the technology to become
standard equipment. “Please,” she begged
[[link removed]] Missouri
legislators, “let police-worn body cameras be a voice of truth and
transparency.”

President Barack Obama put the cameras at the center of his plans
[[link removed]]
to restore trust in policing. Cities quickly began spending millions
on the devices, expenditures that continue today for storage and
software. Los Angeles has spent nearly $60 million since getting
cameras in 2016. In Philadelphia, where footage is rarely released,
the cameras have cost taxpayers about $20 million. New York City has
spent more than $50 million. But whether citizens benefit from the
cameras they’re paying for is often up to the police, who have often
been able to keep footage hidden from the public in even the most
extreme cases. In 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama, an officer unleashed
his police dog on a burglary suspect without warning, severing the
Black man’s femoral artery and killing him. The police and the city
have refused
[[link removed]]
to release footage for five years, arguing that it could cause
“civil unrest” and that the officers could face
“embarrassment.” But a lawyer for the man’s family, which is
suing the city, got a copy of the transcript in the discovery process
and entered it into the court record. “Did you get a bite?” an
officer asked the one who had the dog, according to the document.
“Sure did, heh, heh,” the K-9 officer responded.

The secrecy undercuts the deterrent effect on officer behavior that
many had presumed body cameras would produce. Three years before the
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by
kneeling on his neck, body-camera video caught him kneeling on the
necks of others. In 2017, Chauvin dragged a handcuffed Black woman out
of her house, slammed her to the ground and then pressed his knee into
her neck for nearly five minutes. Three months later, Chauvin hit a
14-year-old Black boy at least twice in the head with a heavy
flashlight, choked him and pushed him against a wall. The boy cried
out in pain and passed out. Chauvin pushed a knee into his neck for 15
minutes as the boy’s mother, reaching to help him, begged,
“Please, please do not kill my son!”

The footage was left in the control of a department where impunity
reigned. Supervisors had access to the recordings yet cleared
Chauvin’s conduct in both cases. Minneapolis fought against
releasing the videos, even after Chauvin pleaded guilty in December
2021 to federal civil rights violations in one of the cases. A judge
finally ordered the city and the police to release the tapes this
April, six years after Chauvin abused the boy. “Chauvin should have
been fired in 2017,” says Robert Bennett, a lawyer who represented
both of the victims. If the police had done that, “the city never
burns. We’d have a downtown still. It’s a parade of horribles. All
to keep something secret.”

A Department of Justice report
[[link removed]] from
this summer found that the secrecy and impunity was all part of a
larger pattern in the Minneapolis Police Department. Shootings,
beatings and other abuse had routinely been captured on video. But the
department didn’t make the footage public or mete out punishment.

There was a similar dynamic in Memphis, Tennessee, where officers in a
street-crimes unit regularly abused
[[link removed]]
residents. They wore body cameras but faced no consequences until the
case of Tyre Nichols, who was beaten to death this January by officers
in the unit, attracted national attention. The footage showed that
some of the officers took their cameras off. Others knew
[[link removed]]
they were being recorded and pummeled Nichols anyway. It was only
after public outcry that the department took the rare step of
releasing footage, which contradicted initial police accounts and led
to state and federal charges for five officers.

Some politicians have often quietly enabled obstacles to this kind of
accountability. When South Carolina became the first state in the
nation to require the use of cameras in 2015, Nikki Haley, the
governor at the time, made the announcement
[[link removed]]
with the family of Walter Scott standing behind her. Scott was a Black
man who, two months earlier, was stopped by the police for a broken
taillight and was shot in the back and killed when he tried to run
away. A witness filmed the shooting, and that video contradicted
official police accounts.

“This is going to make sure Walter Scott did not die without us
realizing that we have a problem,” Haley said as she signed the
legislation. What the governor didn’t say was that the same law
stipulated that footage from cameras is “not a public record subject
to disclosure,” thus relieving police departments from any
obligation to release it. And indeed, little footage has ever become
public in South Carolina.

In 2021, York County sheriff’s deputies responding to a call for a
wellness check found a young man sitting in his pickup truck with his
mother standing next to him. They fired at him nearly 50 times. The
sheriff, who refused to release body-camera footage, said the man
pointed a shotgun at deputies. When the man, who survived, obtained
the footage after suing, it showed no such thing. So far this year,
the police in South Carolina have killed at least 19 people. The
police have released footage in only three of those cases. When we
asked one department, the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office, why
it had not, a spokesperson pointed to the law, writing, “We never
release that footage.”

The pattern has become so common across the country — public talk of
transparency followed by a deliberate undermining of the stated goal
— that the policing-oversight expert Hans Menos, who led
Philadelphia’s civilian police-oversight board until 2020, coined a
term for it: the “body-cam head fake.” And there is no place that
illustrates this as well as New York City, the home of the world’s
largest municipal police force, some 36,000 officers strong.

NEW YORK’S ADOPTION of body-worn cameras started with a moment of
unintentional inspiration. In 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin was hearing
testimony in a federal lawsuit in which multiple advocacy groups
claimed that the Police Department’s aggressive “stop and frisk”
policy was racially biased and unconstitutional. One day during the
trial, an expert witness for the city mentioned a new tool for
accountability — body-worn cameras — in passing.

“My head snapped when I heard the words,” Scheindlin recalled this
year. “I thought, ‘That could be a useful remedy!’”

Two months later, Scheindlin issued a historic ruling
[[link removed]]
that New York’s stop-and-frisk practices were unconstitutional. She
ordered the Police Department to begin piloting body-worn cameras,
writing that they were “uniquely suited to addressing the
constitutional harms at issue in this case.” Scheindlin laid out
three ways the cameras would help: “First, they will provide a
contemporaneous, objective record of stops and frisks.” She
continued, “Second, the knowledge that an exchange is being recorded
will encourage lawful and respectful interactions on the part of both
parties. Third, the recordings will diminish the sense on the part of
those who file complaints that it is their word against the police.”

But in a preview of obstacles that would follow, the department was
slow to roll out the devices, even as they were becoming common in
other cities. More than two years after Scheindlin’s ruling, the
department hired researchers at New York University to conduct a
survey about what residents wanted from a body-camera project. The
community’s answers were overwhelming and clear: transparency and
disclosure.

Officers, however, wanted the opposite. They were concerned that the
recordings would “show a different side of the story than what would
otherwise be told,” according to a separate NYU survey. To
Scheindlin and the plaintiffs in the stop-and-frisk case, that was
exactly the point.

When the department released its policy in April 2017, it was clear
whose opinions held more sway. No video would automatically become
public. Anyone that requested it would have to go through an opaque,
often slow-moving Freedom of Information process — in which the
department itself would be the arbiter of what would be released
(though the courts could review that decision).

The policy blunted the technology’s potential for accountability in
other ways. Officers could decide when to start filming, instead of at
the beginning of all interactions as the public wanted. And while the
public had little access to footage, the police had privileged access:
Officers who were the subjects of complaints would be allowed to watch
the footage before having to give any statements — something that
could allow them to tailor their accounts to the video.

The policy was “so flawed that the pilot program may do little to
protect New Yorkers’ civil rights,” Ian Head and Darius Charney of
the Center for Constitutional Rights wrote
[[link removed]]
in a guest essay in The New York Times. “Instead, it might shield
police officers from accountability when they engage in misconduct.”

Still, on April 27, 2017, Commissioner James O’Neill and Mayor Bill
de Blasio held a news conference at a precinct in Washington Heights
to celebrate the rollout of body-worn cameras. Stepping up to the
lectern, O’Neill said he was initially skeptical of the cameras but
had become a believer. “I’m totally convinced now that this is the
way forward,” he said. “These cameras have a great potential to
de-escalate.”

Then the mayor went to the lectern. Officers had long felt that de
Blasio, a self-proclaimed progressive, was too supportive of Black
Lives Matter protests and not sufficiently supportive of the police.
That sentiment turned into rage when a man espousing hatred of the
police murdered two officers in late 2014. Hundreds of police officers
turned their backs on the mayor at the funerals. Ever since, de Blasio
had been working to repair the relationship.

“This is an historic day for New York City,” de Blasio said, with
O’Neill by his side. “This is the first day of the era of
body-worn cameras, and that means we are going on a pathway of
transparency and accountability that will benefit everyone.”

Five months later, officers killed Miguel Richards, making his case
the first in which the potential of body-camera video would be tested.
But Ruth Lowenkron, the public-interest attorney who filed a request
for the footage, was getting little from the Police Department. After
it rejected her initial request, she appealed the decision. The
department sent her some redacted footage but again rejected her
request for all of it.

Disclosing the full footage would be an “unwarranted invasion of
personal privacy,” the department wrote. Whose privacy — the dead
man’s or the officers’ — was not explained. Releasing the full
footage, the department insisted, could “endanger the life or safety
of any person.”

The letter came from the department’s legal unit, led by its deputy
commissioner, Larry Byrne, who was known for his fierce advocacy for
the department. From the outset of the body-worn-camera program, Byrne
made it clear that he was resistant to widespread release of footage.
“They are not public records in the sense that, because the officer
turns the camera on, they are now in the public domain,” Byrne told
[[link removed]]
NY1 in 2015. In fact, he insisted, “most of this footage” would
never be made public.

Lowenkron kept requesting the Richards footage and kept getting
rejected or sent redacted video. In July 2018, she and her colleagues
decided to file a lawsuit in state court demanding the full footage.
They even got a former Police Department lawyer, Stuart Parker, to
help litigate the suit pro bono. The department’s various
explanations for its denials “pissed me off,” Parker recalls. He
retired from the department as an assistant commissioner in 2016, the
year before cameras were widely rolled out. But he had been excited by
their potential and was frustrated by the department’s kneejerk
secrecy. “There’s a good side to the department,” he says,
“but there’s always been a self-serving dark side to it too.”

In response to the suit, the department argued in legal filings that
it had blurred the footage “in order to protect the privacy of both
Richards and his family.” But Lowenkron and her team had obtained
affidavits from Richards’ parents saying that the department never
asked them whether they wanted the footage released or redacted. And
what the Richardses wanted, they said, was for the full footage to be
released to the public.

PUBLIC DISCLOSURE of footage isn’t the only path to hold officers in
New York accountable for misconduct. For 70 years, the city’s
Civilian Complaint Review Board had been vested with the
responsibility to investigate New Yorkers’ allegations against the
police. From the start, though, its powers were weak. The agency was
actually part of the Police Department, and its board consisted of
three deputy police commissioners. The department fought efforts over
the years to make the agency independent. In the face of a plan in the
mid-1960s to include civilians on the Civilian Complaint Review Board,
the head of the largest police union, then called the Patrolmen’s
Benevolent Association, said, “I’m sick and tired of giving in to
minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting.”

The agency eventually became independent in 1993 after stiff
opposition months before from off-duty officers. Thousands of them —
along with Rudy Giuliani, then a mayoral aspirant after losing the
previous election — staged a huge protest
[[link removed]]
outside City Hall, with many of them going on to block the Brooklyn
Bridge. After the changes, the review board still relied on an often
noncooperative Police Department for records, and its investigations
frequently petered out amid competing accounts. And like many civilian
oversight boards across the country, in the rare cases when it
substantiated misconduct, it could only recommend discipline to the
police commissioner, who could and often did ignore it.

Many civilians, whom the board relied on to initiate complaints, had
long grown skeptical of the agency’s ability to ensure that officer
misconduct had consequences. But the advent of body-camera video
promised to fundamentally change how the agency worked. For the first
time, staff members would have an objective record of the incidents
they investigated. That was Nicole Napolitano’s hope when she joined
the review board as its new director of policy and advocacy in
September 2017 — the same year body cameras were rolled out in New
York and one week after officers killed Richards. “We talked about
it in detail” at the agency, she says of the initial footage of the
Richards shooting. “We thought, ‘Look at what body-worn cameras
can show us.’”

Napolitano, who is married to a retired detective, knew it would be a
challenge. As a senior policy manager in the Office of the Inspector
General for the New York Police Department, she had seen how the
department could simply ignore the recommendations in her reports.
Napolitano hoped she would have more direct impact in her new, more
senior position at the review board. But what she hadn’t appreciated
was how much the police controlled the literal tools of their own
oversight.

As with most civilian boards across the country, the agency did not
have its own access to footage. Like the public, it, too, had to rely
on the cooperation of the department. To try to obtain footage, the
board had to navigate a baroque multistep process. Written requests
were submitted to a department “liaison” unit, which in turn
forwarded them to the legal unit for review. Then the department had
to locate the footage, which was a significant undertaking because it
wasn’t cataloging the footage in any systematic way. Unlike in many
other cities, the department’s cameras had no GPS location data. If
a civilian making a complaint didn’t know an officer’s name or
badge number, investigators and even the department could have a hard
time finding footage.

Perhaps most problematic for Napolitano, though, was the fact that the
review board’s investigators had to agree to a strict set of
conditions before watching videos of incidents. If they spotted other,
unrelated misconduct, they were not allowed to investigate it. “If
you were setting up a system to be shitty,” one agency insider says,
“this is the system you’d create.”

At times, the department’s animosity toward the board was palpable.
Napolitano remembers one meeting in 2017 between board officials and
Kerry Sweet, then a top official at the department’s legal bureau
who helped oversee the body-camera rollout. As other police brass
shuffled in, Sweet said they had missed a chance to “bomb the
room” when only board officials were there, which would have
“solved everything.” (Sweet, who has since retired, says he
doesn’t recall saying that, but added, “On reflection, it should
have been an airstrike.”)

Napolitano and her colleagues noticed an even more troubling trend:
The department would often tell the review board that the footage it
requested didn’t exist — only for the civilian agency to later
discover that wasn’t true. According to an analysis the agency put
out in early 2020, this happened in nearly 1 of every 5 cases.

Napolitano thought there was a straightforward solution to the
department’s stonewalling: The review board should be able to
directly log in to the department’s system where footage is stored.
That’s how it worked with civilian oversight boards in a few other
major American cities, including Chicago, which revamped civilian
oversight after Laquan McDonald was killed in 2014 and the city tried
to withhold footage that contradicted officers’ accounts.
Chicago’s oversight board now not only has direct access to videos
but also regularly releases footage publicly, and its investigators
have used it to successfully push for officers to be fired for
misconduct. Napolitano didn’t see a reason for it to be otherwise in
New York. So in her first semiannual report, at the end of 2017, she
noted the challenges of getting footage — and called on the city to
give the review board direct access. Both the department and City
Hall, Napolitano says, “freaked” out.

“It was a rough time for de Blasio when it came to public safety,”
Napolitano added, referring to the mayor’s tenuous relationship with
the police. “In a dispute between CCRB and NYPD, City Hall always
chose the NYPD. Always.”

“I don’t agree,” de Blasio says. “The tension between the CCRB
and the NYPD is natural and built-in. I decided each issue on the
merits and according to my values.” He went on, “The blunter truth
is when a progressive challenges the police culture and the police
unions and the status quo of American policing, the left is not going
to have their back. You’re not getting that thank-you card. And the
right will viciously attack.”

WHILE THE DEPARTMENT fought Lowenkron and Napolitano on the release of
body-camera footage, there was one group that had access to all of it
and could use it to check for misconduct: the department’s own
investigators. After every police shooting, detectives with the Force
Investigation Division review the incident to see whether officers
complied with department policy. The Richards case was the first time
body-worn-camera footage could let them see what actually happened in
a killing by officers. As investigators dug through the video and
interviewed officers in the weeks and months after the shooting, they
saw a far more complicated picture than the one the police
commissioner painted.

As the tape began, one officer, Mark Fleming, beamed his flashlight
into the far side of Richards’ nearly bare, unlit bedroom. Richards
was standing perfectly still in the dark, seemingly catatonic, wearing
a blue polo shirt and sunglasses and holding a knife in his left hand.

Department guidelines for dealing with people in crisis who do not
pose an immediate threat say officers should try to “isolate and
contain” the person. “The primary duty of all members of the
service is to preserve human life,” department policy states.
Officers are also instructed to wait for a supervisor’s permission
before trying to subdue someone in crisis.

At first, it appeared that the officers who encountered Richards were
following their training. “Look, we could shut the door,” Officer
Redmond Murphy suggested to his partner. But Fleming, who had served
more years in the department, quickly rejected the idea. He kept
telling Richards to drop the knife, and he radioed for an officer with
a Taser.

Two officers from the specially trained Emergency Services Unit, which
deals with people experiencing mental health crises, arrived. Then
Murphy said he thought he saw something, perhaps a gun, in Richards’
right hand, which was obscured behind a backpack on the bed. “Hold
up,” one of the ESU officers told Fleming and Murphy before heading
back downstairs to grab protective gear. “I don’t know if it’s a
toy or a gun,” Murphy quickly added.

As the specialists went downstairs, the officer with the Taser, Jesus
Ramos, went upstairs and joined Fleming and Murphy outside Richards’
room. “Do you want to take him down now?” Ramos asked them.
“Yeah,” they both answered.

At nearly the same moment, a radio command came from headquarters,
emphasizing department guidelines. “Isolate and contain,” the
dispatcher told the officers. “Use nonlethal force whenever
possible.” As Ramos lifted his Taser and stepped into the room,
Fleming — who later said Richards was raising his arm — fired his
gun. Murphy fired, too. It’s impossible to see that moment in the
grainy, shaky footage. The clearest angle would most likely have been
Fleming’s camera, but it was covered by his arm as he held his
flashlight.

Fleming and Murphy fired 16 times, hitting Richards seven times,
including twice in the chest, rupturing his aorta. As gunshots rang
out, the supervisor they were supposed to wait for arrived. (None of
the officers responded to requests for comment.)

The internal investigators asked the officers to explain. “We kind
of handle everything on our own,” Murphy offered. An internal
investigator pressed Fleming about what had “situationally
changed” and prompted the decision to “take him at that point.”
Fleming said everything changed once his partner said Richards might
have a gun. “I perceived that his intentions were lethal,” Fleming
said. But his answers suggested that he hadn’t fully grasped
Richards’ mental state. “Why would any sane person hide a fake
gun?” Fleming asked.

When the investigators asked why the two officers did not broadcast
that Richards was an “EDP” — or an emotionally disturbed person
— with a knife, as protocol dictates, Murphy told them he and
Fleming had handled people in crisis before. Asked why they made the
decision to use force, Murphy simply said, “We wanted to, like, end
it.”

While the Force Investigation Division ultimately concluded that the
officers had been “justified” in shooting — because they were
facing an “individual armed with a knife and an imitation firearm”
— the investigators also said that Fleming and Murphy should still
be punished. Richards, their September 2018 internal report noted
[[link removed]],
“was contained and posed no immediate threat of danger.” And the
officers violated policy by not asking permission from their
supervisor before they acted. The department’s full investigative
record was first reported by the independent journalist Michael Hayes
in his 2023 book, “The Secret Files.” The review recommended that
the officers face disciplinary charges that could ultimately result in
their firing.

But in New York, as in almost all cities in the United States, the
police commissioner has absolute power
[[link removed]] over
punishment. In March 2019, O’Neill, who had extolled the promise of
body cameras just two years earlier, overruled his own investigators.
He decided that neither Fleming nor Murphy would be punished for
killing Richards. Instead, the commissioner docked them three vacation
days for something else they did: stopping for pizza before responding
to the call for the wellness check. (O’Neill did not respond to
questions or requests for comment.)

It would be another three months before anyone outside the department
would see the full footage. That June, a New York judge ruled that the
“public is vested with an inherent right to know” and ordered the
department to turn over the recordings to Lowenkron’s organization.

She received a package with a DVD a month later from the department.
Bracing herself, she sat down to view it on her computer. The footage
that the department publicly released cut off when the officers fired.
Lowenkron now saw the aftermath: Richards collapsed to the floor,
crumpled and bleeding in the same spot where he had been standing
rigidly seconds before.

“He’s still alive,” Fleming said.

“Holy shit,” Murphy replied. “Just fucking cuff him.”

The officers then flipped over Richards, severely injured, so roughly
that his head could be heard bouncing off the floor.

They searched around the room for the firearm they thought Richards
had. Eventually, Fleming found a palm-size, silver-colored plastic toy
gun. “It’s some fucking little thing,” he said. (The video does
not show Richards holding the toy gun.) More than three minutes passed
before anyone administered any type of aid to the dying man. It was an
Emergency Services Unit specialist who retrieved medical equipment
after hearing the shots.

Outside the apartment building, more video recorded other officers
milling about. One told a colleague, “They were just hurling fucking
shots.”

Lowenkron was shocked. Officers had shot a young man and roughly
handled him as he bled to death. “The utter disrespect,” Lowenkron
says. “It was a horror movie.”

New York Lawyers for the Public Interest would go on to share the
footage with journalists. It would also use the footage in a webinar
for mental health advocates in November 2020. “The point,”
Lowenkron told me, “was to get more people engaged on this issue:
transforming New York and this country’s response to people in
crisis.”

But by then, for another man in distress, it was too late.

IN APRIL 2019, one month after O’Neill decided against punishing the
officers for the Richards shooting, another officer shot and killed a
man named Kawaski Trawick.

The circumstances were remarkably similar to those in the Richards
case. Trawick was also a young Black man who lived in the Bronx and
was experiencing a mental health crisis in his own apartment. He was
also holding a knife when the police arrived. And he was also shot
soon afterward. At the Civilian Complaint Review Board, Napolitano was
immediately struck by the parallels: “I remember reading the
headline on Trawick and thinking, ‘Didn’t I read this
already?’”

This time, though, the victim’s family filed a complaint with the
review board, providing an opening for civilian investigators to use
body-worn-camera footage to make a case that the department and others
couldn’t ignore.

But despite repeated requests over many months, the department
wouldn’t share the footage — or any other records — with the
review board, leaving the oversight agency effectively unable to begin
its own investigation of the case. The refusal was in line with the
department’s longstanding practice to withhold footage from the
board until the department’s internal investigation was over, a
process that often takes more than a year. Such delays can effectively
torpedo the review board’s investigations: Under New York
civil-service law, any disciplinary cases against police officers must
be brought within 18 months of the incident.

In the Trawick case, the review board obtained the full body-camera
video in January 2021 — more than a year and a half after the
killing — and only after a state judge ordered the department to
hand it over to Lowenkron’s organization, New York Lawyers for the
Public Interest, which had sued for it. The judge determined that the
department had been withholding the footage “in bad faith.”
[[link removed]]

What it showed
[[link removed]]
was even more damning than what was captured in the Richards shooting.
As the police entered his apartment, Trawick demanded to know, “Why
are you in my home?” One officer, Herbert Davis, who was Black and
more experienced, then tried to stop his white junior counterpart,
Brendan Thompson, from using force. “We ain’t gonna tase him,”
Davis said in the video.

Thompson didn’t listen. Instead, he fired his Taser at Trawick,
sending roughly 50,000 volts pulsing through him. As Trawick started
rushing toward the officers, Thompson lifted his gun and prepared to
fire. “No, no — don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,”
Davis said, pushing his partner’s arm down. But Thompson fired four
shots, hitting Trawick twice and killing him almost instantly, 112
seconds after they arrived at the apartment. (Davis and Thompson did
not reply to requests for comment.)

There was also troubling footage of the aftermath of the shooting.
Officers swarmed outside Trawick’s apartment. “Who’s injured?”
a sergeant asked. Two officers replied in near unison: “Nobody. Just
a perp.”

With all that in hand, the review board completed its investigation in
June 2021. The agency, through one of the few powers it had gained
over the years, can file and prosecute disciplinary cases against
officers — which triggers a Police Department trial, after which a
departmental judge sends a provisional decision to the police
commissioner, who makes the final call.

This September, the police judge overseeing the Trawick case
recommended that there should be no discipline. Her reason had nothing
to do with the shooting itself; in fact, the judge wrote
[[link removed]]
that she had “serious doubts” about the decisions of the officer
who killed Trawick. But the review board, she said, had failed to file
charges within the 18-month statute of limitations, as outlined under
state law. In the end, the department’s refusal to give the footage
to the review board had effectively run out the clock on any chance
the officers would be punished.

“That should not be tolerated,” says Jeff Schlanger, the former
deputy commissioner. “Both CCRB and NYPD are city agencies. This is
something the mayor needs to resolve.”

IN THE WAKE OF George Floyd’s murder in 2020, huge demonstrations
for racial justice and against police brutality rolled across the
country and the world. It was a global reckoning brought on by footage
— the video, recorded by a teenager on her smartphone for more than
eight minutes, showing Derek Chauvin ending Floyd’s life.

Napolitano and her team at the review board had collected data showing
how footage could make a difference in New York too. Access to
body-camera footage roughly doubled the likelihood that agency
investigators would be able to decide a case on its merits rather than
dismiss it as inconclusive. But the backlog was growing. That May, the
board filed 212 requests with the Police Department for
body-worn-camera footage — and the department sent only 33
responses. (While the pandemic slowed the work of all city agencies,
the backlog predated it.)

“The withholding of footage stops investigations and prevents the
CCRB from providing adequate and meaningful oversight of the NYPD,”
an internal agency memo warned
[[link removed]].
“The situation for New York City oversight of the police has
steadily grown worse during the duration of a BWC program intended
primarily to aid oversight.”

Napolitano campaigned internally for a law that would take away the
department’s absolute control over footage and give the review board
its own access. That November, she was let go, along with three other
staff members who had sent pointed emails and memos about the
department’s withholding of footage. The four filed a lawsuit
claiming that their firing violated their First Amendment rights and
received an undisclosed settlement. A review-board spokesperson wrote
in an email that the agency has “publicly and repeatedly called on
legislators to support the fight for direct access. No employee has
ever been fired for supporting direct access to BWC footage.”

This spring, the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, and the New
York City public advocate, Jumaane Williams, sponsored a bill that
would give the review board direct access to footage so that it
wouldn’t be beholden to the department for cooperation during
investigations. “There are difficult split-second decisions that
have to happen” in policing, Williams told me. “But if we’re not
able to look at the same thing, if we have to take the word of the
NYPD, that doesn’t make this conversation any easier.”

The Police Department has opposed the bill. A department official
insisted at a City Council hearing in March that the department
“does not fear transparency.” But the official argued that it
would be an “insurmountable obstacle” to give the review board
direct access while following state confidentiality laws. The bill has
been stalled for months.

The city, meanwhile, paid out at least $121 million in settlements
last year for lawsuits alleging misconduct by police officers — the
highest total in five years.

With footage remaining in the control of the Police Department,
body-worn cameras have made little difference to the public. This
year, a federal court monitor wrote a scathing report
[[link removed]]
about persistent problems with stop-and-frisk, the unconstitutional
policing tactic that prompted Scheindlin to order the department to
adopt body cameras a decade ago. The monitor found that contrary to
Scheindlin’s expectations, police supervisors weren’t using
footage to flag misconduct. In a sample of cases the monitor looked
at, supervisors reviewing footage of stop-and-frisk encounters
concluded that 100% of the cases they looked at were proper stops. The
court monitor reviewed the same footage and found that 37% of the
stops were unconstitutional.

“It was an experiment,” Scheindlin says, one that didn’t
anticipate issues like control over footage. Scheindlin, who stepped
down from the bench in 2016, says she now believes that the Police
Department should no longer be the sole custodian of its own video.
“That troubles me,” she says. “It should always be somebody
independent.”

In interviews with a half-dozen former commanders and high-level
officials, most of whom were involved in the body-camera program
itself, they said that despite its public pronouncements, the
department hasn’t committed to using footage for accountability.
“Body cams are essential, if done right,” says a high-ranking
commander who just retired and who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because he still works in law enforcement. “They are a game
changer.” He added, “If there’s a problem, you flag — and
potentially there’s discipline. But that’s not happening in most
cases.” Instead, he says, body cameras have become “an exercise in
just work they have to do. It’s a culture thing.”

Rudy Hall has a particularly useful vantage point. He was part of the
team that rolled out the body cameras, visiting police departments
around the country to see how they were using the technology, and has
gone on to work for the federal monitor overseeing the department’s
compliance with Scheindlin’s now-decade-old order on stop-and-frisk.
“I watch a lot of body-cam videos,” Hall told me. “I have
absolutely seen supervisors approve problematic conduct.”

“Body-worn cameras have not been exploited the way they should
be,” says Jeff Schlanger, the former deputy commissioner. “The way
to true reform is through using body cams as an early-warning system,
as a way to correct small mistakes before they become big mistakes.
But there weren’t a lot of discussions about it. The NYPD needs to
do a lot better.”

One of the most comprehensive studies of the use of body cameras, a
2019 meta-analysis led by researchers at George Mason University,
recommended
[[link removed]]
that police departments consider using footage the way sports teams
use game tape, to regularly review and improve performance. That’s
essentially what the New Orleans Police Department did after the U.S.
Department of Justice put it under federal oversight about a decade
ago in response to the police killings of several Black men and
persistent police violence. Body cameras were a “critical engine for
us to continuously evaluate performance,” says Danny Murphy, who ran
a unit at the department overseeing compliance with the federal
mandate.

Four auditors were hired to join the police force and comb through
footage. They looked to make sure that officers were using their
cameras and that supervisors were flagging any problematic behavior.
“If officers know they’re being viewed, if supervisors know
they’re being reviewed, it creates a pressure for accountability,”
says Murphy, who left the department four years ago. A 2020 report
from the city’s civilian oversight agency — which has direct
access to footage — noted a reduction in both the use of force and
citizen complaints, which the department attributed to “the use of
the body-worn cameras and the increased scrutiny and oversight these
cameras provide leadership.” The police in New Orleans also
regularly and quickly release video from shootings and other major
incidents. But in the end, it’s the police chief who has the final
say on discipline.

During his tenure at the New York Police Department, Schlanger had, in
fact, started a kind of internal oversight system similar to the one
in New Orleans. Schlanger and other senior officials would meet with
each of the department’s 77 precincts every six months and look at
body-camera footage to identify problematic trends and officers. “It
was CompStat for constitutional policing,” Schlanger says, referring
to the department’s data-heavy program for tracking crime. “If we
saw a precinct doing poorly, we’d work to help them. It made a
difference.”

The department quietly ended the review program last year.

A CIVIL SUIT ON BEHALF of Miguel Richards’ estate was filed against
the city in 2018. New York is seeking the dismissal of the case. A
judge has been considering the request for two and a half years. “I
want answers,” his mother told me, “and haven’t been able to get
them.”

The three officers involved in the Richards shooting were honored in
2018 by the largest New York police union, the Police Benevolent
Association, which gave them its Finest of the Finest award for
“extremely brave and tactically sound action” in the Richards
shooting, noting that “the officers had no choice but to open
fire.”

The officers were later deposed in the lawsuit. One of them, Mark
Fleming, said in his testimony in September 2020 that he had learned a
lesson: that the Emergency Services Unit — whose help he told
department investigators he didn’t need — is in fact better
equipped and trained to deal with situations that involve people
having a mental health crisis.

It’s not clear what, if any, lessons the department itself has taken
in. Since Richards’ death in 2017, when cameras were widely rolled
out, officers have killed at least 11 people in crisis. There is no
evidence that officers have been punished in any of the cases.

On a Sunday morning in the Bronx this spring, there was another
shooting. Santo de la Cruz called a city emergency line. His son,
42-year-old Raul de la Cruz, was in the middle of a schizophrenic
episode and had posted a disturbing video on Facebook that morning.
Wearing camouflage clothing and a hat with a patch of an Israeli flag,
Raul complained about racist police officers. His father called 311,
avoiding 911 because he was afraid of what would happen if the police
showed up. “I thought they would send someone capable of dealing
with a situation like that,” he says in Spanish. “Because I was
calling for a sick person, not to send the police to shoot him up.”
But it was the police who arrived, with body cameras rolling. And Raul
was holding a knife.

The officers shot him 28 seconds
[[link removed]]
after arriving. He was hospitalized for more than a month before being
released, having lost a kidney and part of his liver. A department
commander cited the body-camera footage when he gave a brief news
conference the day of the shooting to describe what happened. “This
situation was fast, volatile and dangerous,” he said. The
officers’ “quick response saved at least one civilian and
protected themselves.”

But the department has not released the footage or commented in the
eight months since.

Lowenkron’s colleagues at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest
have once again requested the video, so far to no avail. The
department has also withheld the footage from the Civilian Complaint
Review Board, per the practice of sharing records with the agency only
after its own investigation is done.

On Dec. 5, weeks after we sent questions to the department about that
practice, the department signed a memorandum of understanding with the
board to send footage to it within 90 days of a request.

But for now, nobody outside the department knows exactly what happened
in the de la Cruz shooting, including the family. They have not heard
anything from the department. They want to see the footage.

* Police
[[link removed]]
* police shootings
[[link removed]]
* body cameras
[[link removed]]
* police accountability
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]