Surveillance footage acquired by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows NYPD officers and Parks Department employees destroying the possessions of two small groups of homeless men and women in East Harlem in early October, and is grounds for a new lawsuit against the city announced Monday afternoon.
Floyd Parks, 61, was among one of the groups that sought shelter under the overhang at Choir Academy, a public school in East Harlem, on the evening of October 1st. Early the next morning the group was rousted by police and Parks Department employees in white hazmat suits. The authorities told them they were no longer welcome underneath the overhang, and began to toss their possessions into a waiting sanitation truck.
"They said 'Get up we're taking your carts,'" Parks wrote in his Civil Complaint Review Board report filed later that morning. A former ambulette driver from Long Island, he's been homeless for about five years.
Speaking with us a few days after the incident, he recalled, "There were some people they grabbed [items] from, tossed them around, skinned their knees."
Parks and his companions, including two other homeless men named in the suit, Timmy Hall and Jesus Morales, lost a considerable amount of personal property that night—birth certificates, social security cards, blood pressure medication, winter clothing and, in Parks's case, a list of names and phone numbers, including contact information for city shelters.
"The government has no right to treat homeless people's few personal possessions like garbage," said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman in a statement. "No matter how much pressure the city is under to address homelessness, all people deserve to be treated with basic humanity."
Norman Siegel, a civil rights attorney and former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, echoed Lieberman's sentiment in the immediate aftermath of the raid.
"If you're on private property the cops can tell you the owner doesn't want you here, and you have to leave," he explained. However, "If they threw out people's papers, [that's] destruction of private property. What they're supposed to do is take the property and voucher it, and let people pick it up later."
Anthony Rainey with his EBT card and a credit card, the only personal items he says were spared when NYPD and Parks employees took his belongings on October 2nd (Jessica Leibowitz/Gothamist).
Before today's release of surveillance footage, pulled from four cameras on the school property, witness testimony and a few grainy cellphone photos were the only evidence standing against the NYPD's account of the incident. According to the NYPD at the time, Parks and his companions were told to take their personal belongings, and anything "left behind" was thrown into Parks Department trucks.
In the surveillance footage, Parks employees are seen shining flashlights on men sleeping on the ground and dragging their possessions to the sanitation trucks.
The raid took place in phases—one group on East 127th Street and Park Avenue was rousted around 5:00 a.m., and a second group farther west on East 127th was awoken about fifteen minutes later. One camera's footage shows an unidentified officer kicking at least one sleeping person awake with his or her foot.
The NYCLU suit asks the city to reimburse Parks, Morales and Hall for the possessions lost, no more than $800 per person, as well as "damages for emotional distress."
Today's news comes days after Mayor de Blasio's announcement of HOME-STAT—an initiative to canvass the homeless populations in Manhattan daily, increase homeless outreach staff, and up the number of police officers on the NYPD's homeless outreach unit.
Some advocacy groups including Picture the Homeless (of which Parks, Morales and Hall are members), have expressed early skepticism of the initiative, suggesting that more concentrated policing could have negative consequences.
"The Mayor and the police commissioner are trying to show people they're doing something, to get the public off their back, but there's nothing to it ... except more surveillance and more police targeting homeless African-Americans and Hispanics," Parks said last week.
In the wake of the HOME-STAT announcement, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has said that the NYPD is seeking legislation that would allow police to remove homeless people from certain areas more easily, "if we are able to frame it in a way that the courts don't overrule."
Alexis Karteron, a senior attorney for the NYCLU, said of HOME-STAT, "I think it's something for all of us to keep an eye on," adding, "homelessness is a tragedy and not a crime, and the city government should be treating it that way."
Parks recently moved into a Safe Haven shelter in the Bronx—part of a de Blasio initiative that offers shelter in houses of worship to street homeless people who do not want to go to big shelters. He acquired a new copy of his social security card earlier this month, but is still without a birth certificate.
"Things are not good, but they're getting better," he said this afternoon. "The attitude towards us has changed a lot. We used to constantly get hassled, the cops telling us to move."
Since October, Parks and many of his companions have started carrying cards that state their legal right to be in public so long as they are not blocking street traffic—part of a Siegel initiative to reduce NYPD arrests of street homeless.
"This lawsuit, this is what we need," Parks said. "We need to be out there in spotlight because people have been looking past us for so long."
UPDATE: Mayoral spokeswoman Karen Hinton issued the following statement:
Our number one priority in street homeless outreach is to get individuals the shelter and services they deserve. The incident mentioned in the notices of claim is not a part of the City’s encampments initiative, HOME-STAT, or any homeless outreach work. This incident involves individuals trespassing on school grounds. It is illegal for individuals to trespass and sleep on school grounds, and we will not tolerate it for security and safety reasons. That said, we will review our protocols concerning the seizure and disposition of personal property to ensure that it can be reclaimed by its rightful owners.
