In 2023, the City of New York settled a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general and others over the handling of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 by agreeing that the Police Department would no longer box in and arrest demonstrators, a tactic known as “kettling.”
But according to a lawsuit filed late Monday night, the oft-criticized practice of surrounding protesters and arresting them was nonetheless used more recently against pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan as a proposed class action, said that the police had subjected protesters to false arrest and used excessive force, violating First Amendment rights and retaliating against people who had exercised those rights.
Members of the Police Department, the lawsuit said, had engaged in behavior that included “trapping protesters into spaces where they could not escape, beating protesters with batons and fists, throwing protesters to the ground, using pepper spray indiscriminately and ultimately arresting many of the protesters without lawful justification and without fair warning.”
In addition to unspecified damages, the suit asked that a judge issue orders stopping the police from “violently disrupting” protests or engaging in the behavior described in the suit.
Demonstrations over Israel and Palestine persist in New York. Thousands rallied in November before the Israeli prime minister’s speech to the United Nations and smaller groups have gathered regularly in Times Square and other locations. This month, pro-Palestine protesters occupied senators’ offices.
The plaintiffs asked for the court to oversee the Police Department’s protest response until “unlawful conditions, practice, policies, acts and omissions complained of herein no longer exist” and the court is satisfied that they will not recur — the sort of expansive role that judges have occasionally taken in the past but that is far from the norm.
The city’s Law Department and the Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning. City officials have said that they are committed to honoring the terms of the earlier settlement and that any use of force has been justified by protesters’ actions.
The Hamas attacks of October 2023 and the response by the Israeli government unleashed widespread rancor, including street protests in New York City and the occupation of university properties.
During rallies and gatherings in the city, some protesters have waved Hamas or Hezbollah flags or questioned the right of Israel to exist, prompting accusations of antisemitism or hate speech. At the same time, some protesters have accused university officials and the police of using antisemitism as a pretext to crack down on political speech criticizing the actions of the Israeli government or its supporters. And during a protest this year in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, pro-Israel demonstrators surrounded a woman and hurled slurs at her.
The allegations in the lawsuit filed on Monday have raised questions, once again, about how the Police Department handles large-scale political protests.
Over the past 20 years, the federal courts in Manhattan have become a forum for protesters who were arrested during the Republican National Convention in 2004, the Occupy Wall Street marches in 2011 and 2012 and the protests over the killing of George Floyd in 2020. In lawsuits, they have asserted that they were wrongly detained, with some settlements as high as nearly $18 million.
While the 2023 settlement regarding the Black Lives Matter protests involved large and well-funded organizations like the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society, the lawsuit filed on Monday was drafted by a group of civil rights lawyers in private practice using a more aggressive approach.
They are motivated in part by the belief that while previous settlements have brought about important changes, the Police Department continues to overreact to protests.
“The underlying issue remains: Police still shut down protests with mass arrests for minor infractions where protesters are removed from the scene for enough hours to ensure the protest ends,” said Elena Cohen, one of 10 lawyers to sign the complaint. “The standard is now to tackle anyone to the ground, no matter how calm the situation is and how minor any alleged violation is.”
The suit attributed some practices to a lack of training, saying that the department does not sufficiently instruct officers in how to accommodate lawful protests, instead concentrating on to how to quell violent or unlawful actions.
On top of that, the suit asserted that some Police Department training on antisemitism has been Islamophobic or anti-Palestinian, citing a report in the publication Jewish Currents that said one training session had categorized kaffiyeh scarves and watermelons — sometimes used as pro-Palestinian symbols — as antisemitic.
The suit’s 11 named plaintiffs were said to have been arrested during protests in Bay Ridge; outside the Barclays Center; in front of the New School in Lower Manhattan; on the Upper East Side; and at Brooklyn College.
One plaintiff, Bryan Vivas, the lawsuit said, was shocked with a Taser during the Brooklyn College protest in 2024, when a crowd of demonstrators paused outside the college’s Tanger Hillel House, with one member of the group denouncing the building as a “Zionist institution.”
The suit said that another plaintiff, Moné Makkawi, 32, had been arrested near the New School in May by an officer who “threw her onto the asphalt, pushing her face into the ground.” She suffered injuries to her wrists, head and left elbow, the lawsuit said, along with a scrape on her forehead and was charged with obstruction of governmental administration. Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to pursue that charge, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said that a third plaintiff, Ahmed Elsayed, 59, had been arrested outside the Barclays Center in 2024 when he became upset that his daughter and one of her friends were being taken into custody and called for officers to take him instead, turning around and placing his hands behind his back while standing on a sidewalk.
A moment later, the suit said, an officer “pounced on Mr. Elsayed, dragged him off the sidewalk, threw him to the ground, broke his glasses and ripped his shirt.” He was charged with resisting arrest, the lawsuit said, adding that prosecutors with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office declined to pursue that charge.
The post Suit Accuses N.Y.P.D. of Continued Aggression at Protests Over Gaza appeared first on New York Times.
