On June 4th, LoriKim Alexander, a 44-year-old Bronx resident, was marching against police brutality in the borough’s Mott Haven neighborhood. Without warning, hundreds of heavily armored NYPD officers trapped the group on a narrow street, then rushed at them from either end with batons, bikes, and pepper-spray. More than 250 demonstrators were arrested, most of them on charges of violating the mayor's curfew order that were later dismissed.
In a court filing, Alexander, who is Black and suffers from arthritis, recalled a white NYPD officer ripping her mask from her face, then pushing her arm behind her back so far she believed it would break. She witnessed blood pouring from a protester’s head, she said, as officers ignored screams for a medic. Later, she was transported to a Queens precinct, where she was held until 2 a.m. in handcuffs so tight they left scars on each of her wrists, she said.
In a 99-page report, Human Rights Watch identified at least 61 people — including protesters, legal observers, and bystanders — who suffered injuries as a result of the NYPD crackdown. At least three people were hospitalized.
But at a time when New York City faces a growing pile of lawsuits over the NYPD’s treatment of protesters last spring, Alexander and some of her fellow participants in the Bronx demonstration are taking an alternative approach to the standard process of litigation.
On Tuesday, the newly-formed “Mott Haven Collective” plans to announce their demand for a municipal reparations fund to address the NYPD’s actions on June 4th. The money would be dispensed to those who were harmed at the now infamous protest, as well as “the broader Bronx community that has been subjected to generations of violence and discrimination at the hands of the police,” according to a letter the group sent to de Blasio and Comptroller Scott Stringer.
Reparation efforts typically deal with historic injustices of slavery and Jim Crowe, and proponents of the idea acknowledge that there is no existing model for such a fund. The closest precedent may be found in Chicago, which passed a reparations package in 2016 to pay out $5.5 million to 57 people who had been tortured by the city’s police decades earlier.
Andre Perry, a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institution, said that a reparations strategy for acts of mass police violence could present a worthy substitute to individual lawsuits.
“Reparations is an acknowledgment that you did a wrong. There needs to be an offering of apology, there needs to be financial compensation, and the person who’s been injured needs to accept that apology,” said Perry, who's previously written about the subject. “Litigation often removes some of those necessary healing processes.”
After city investigators found widespread failures in the NYPD’s policing of the George Floyd protests, de Blasio issued a broad apology last month. But he has stopped short of offering a full-throated condemnation of the department’s actions in Mott Haven, an operation his own NYPD commissioner described as “executed nearly flawlessly.” Asked about calls to discipline the high-ranking police leaders involved in the crackdown, he’s instead pointed to new, non-binding disciplinary guidelines as proof of accountability going forward.
A legal observer from the National Lawyers Guild is arrested in Mott Haven in the Bronx in June 2020.
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, an attorney with the Bronx Defenders, which represents the 24-member collective and spearheaded the demand letter, said the reparations fund was conceived as “an answer to police violence that might actually get us to a place of healing, rather than turning to the police departments and asking them to fix their training and paperwork again.”
The letter notes that while Lower Manhattan experienced the most extensive looting — prompting the mayor’s curfew — it was Mott Haven, a majority Black and brown neighborhood, that saw the largest mass arrest. During the height of the demonstrations, between May 28th and June 5th, Black protesters received 68% of felony charges while only comprising 38.4% of the people charged, according to city data.
Because settlements are frequently worked out in secret, sometimes over the course of years, the NYPD is able to forego meaningful scrutiny of misconduct, Borchetta added. The proposed fund would allow those who were seriously hurt in Mott Haven to skip the onerous process of filing an individual suit, while proving the city is serious about mending relations in the Bronx after years of racist over-policing, according to the attorney.
“It is important for New York City to respond unequivocally to say that what NYPD did to the Bronx and the protesters in the Bronx that night is unacceptable,” Borchetta told Gothamist. “They need to try something different this time if they're actually going to stand up against this kind of egregious misconduct.”
Several aspects of the fund remain nebulous. It’s unclear how the money might be doled out to other protesters and the broader community, or how much the group is seeking from the city. Borchetta said the decisions would be made with community input, and could go to services like health care and education “that would help rehabilitate the community from the harms it suffers as a result of police violence.” She pegged the figure at millions of dollars.
Every Sunday outside the 40th Precinct, local residents protest the wrongful arrest of peaceful protesters on June 4th
Currently, the group is seeking a meeting with the mayor as well as the city’s comptroller, Scott Stringer, who has the power to settle claims on the city’s behalf.
In 2019, the city paid out $230 million for NYPD misconduct — a vast majority of which was awarded by the comptroller prior to litigation. Of the NYPD’s ten most sued cops that year, six of them worked in the Bronx.
A spokesperson for Stringer, who has promised an overhaul of NYPD accountability as part of his mayoral campaign, said his office would review the issues with the claimants' lawyers. Inquiries to the Mayor’s Office and the NYPD were not returned.
Like several protesters who attended the march, Alexander said the experience has left her with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including diminished energy and a fear of going outside that’s persisted more than seven months after the fact. Other members of the collective describe the emotional toll of knowing they could be terrorized by police at any time for walking peacefully in their own neighborhoods.
“Many of us are still suffering from injuries inflicted that day — some of us are damaged for life,” Alexander said. “The city must take responsibility for the NYPD's racist violence against us, and make things right for the Bronx community."
