The New York Police Department reversed years-long opposition to legislation banning chokeholds Tuesday as the City Council grilled the brass over their response to unrest following George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police.
“The department can support this legislation with minor amendments,” First Deputy Police Commissioner Ben Tucker told lawmakers during a council hearing set for Tuesday morning.
Tucker, however, insisted to the council’s Public Safety Committee that a carve-out be added to the bill, requiring that prosecutors prove the chokehold was applied intentionally, an issue that sat at the heart of the Eric Garner case.
That concession didn’t soften lawmakers’ reception for officials, which included a slew of contentious exchanges focused on the NYPD’s aggressive tactics policing post-curfew protests and the department’s failure to crack down on cops not wearing facemasks amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Councilman Donovan Richards set the tone at the start, ripping Commissioner Dermot Shea for failing to appear at the first hearing since the Floyd protests erupted — and sending the department’s highest-ranking African-American official instead, Tucker.
“Speaking of who is here today, where is the commissioner?” Richards said in his opening remarks. “I do see the man who maybe should be the Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner Tucker.”
He continued, “Commissioner Shea had an opportunity to answer for the actions of the department in the middle of a major crisis over the history of racialized brutality in this city and he sends the black man who didn’t get the job.”
Tucker was passed over for the top post twice — when Mayor de Blasio selected former Commissioner James O’Neill in 2016 and Shea in 2019.
The chokehold bill — brought by Councilman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) — would create a local criminal penalty for using chokeholds, taking such cases out of the NYPD’s internal discipline system and allowing prosecutors to bring them into open court.
Under Lancman’s bill, any officer convicted of using a chokehold could face a year in prison and a fine of up to $2,500.
Garner, a Staten Island man, died in 2014 after Officer Daniel Pantaleo was videotaped placing him in a chokehold during an attempted arrest for selling untaxed cigarettes, igniting months of protests across the city and fueling the national Black Lives Matter movement.
Pantaleo’s attorneys argued during his internal disciplinary hearing in 2019 — which only got underway after years of delays — he should not be fired because he never intended to use the banned maneuver. Following the trial, Pantaleo was terminated by O’Neill.
The Council is also considering a slew of other bills aimed at increasing oversight of the department, including measures that would:
- Require officers to display their ranks and badge numbers;
- Create a centralized system to better track and retrain problematic officers;
- Codify the public’s right to record law enforcement actions.
It was the first hearing of the Council’s public safety committee following the upheaval of the last two weeks since Floyd’s death was captured on video and beamed around the world.
In it, the Minneapolis man can be heard complaining that ‘I can’t breathe’ as a police officer there kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes — a painful echo of the Eric Garner case in New York from 2014, which helped to fuel the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Tucker’s testimony acknowledged the strain the case from half-way across the nation had put on the NYPD’s relationship with the Big Apple’s minority communities, calling Floyd’s death “horrific and deeply disturbing.”
“What we saw in Minneapolis was simply a betrayal of that oath and a gross dereliction of duty,” Tucker told the lawmakers. “It severely damaged every effort being made by our officers to connect with our communities and build trust with our people.”
“Simply put, it was an atrocity, fatal to Mr. Floyd and deeply damaging to police-community relations here in New York and everywhere in our nation,” he added. “Our profession is better than that.”