U.S.
Dennis Flores
The strip of Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn lit up by taquerias and Mexican bakeries was just beginning to shutter for the night, as a shopkeeper dragged the last of the display mannequins from the sidewalk into a clothing store. David Galluzo, 17, shivered in his thin varsity jacket as he made his way to 46th Street to meet the other members of El Grito de Sunset Park, a neighborhood group that monitors police aggression in their community.
Some of the members walked with hoodies tied tightly around their faces and GoPro cameras strapped to their chests. Dennis Flores, who started the group a decade ago, listened to a police scanner. “Aw man, sounds like all of the cops are in Prospect Park,” he said.
Galluzo, a senior and varsity running back at New Utrecht High School, once wanted to be a cop. The Puerto Rican and Italian teen is now wary of police and teaches his seven younger siblings to just ignore them. “We just decided we wanted nothing to do with the 72nd Precinct anymore,” he said.
A predominantly immigrant community that has seen an influx of Hispanic and Chinese residents over the last three decades, Sunset Park is rife with tension between the police and the community. The annual Puerto Rican Day Parade habitually ends in clashes between residents and police, and it is where Galluzo and his family had a run-in with the cops in June.
Since the parade, several other incidents of alleged aggression by local police have been caught on camera. In mid-September, footage emerged of cops wrestling 22-year-old fruit vendor Jonathan Daza to the ground and kicking him in the back at a street fair. A week later, a different video showed 44-year-old Sandra Amezquita, six months pregnant, thrown belly first on the ground when she intervened as cops arrested her 17-year-old son.
These events unfolded as the issue of police brutality — particularly in communities of color — has gripped the nation’s attention. Since a grand jury decided in November not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, protests against excessive police force have flared up across the country. Demonstrations erupted in New York City two weeks later when a grand jury in Staten Island declined to indict an officer for the death of Eric Garner, who suffered a fatal heart attack after an officer put him in a chokehold. Continued demonstrations culminated in Saturday's Millions March New York City when tens of thousands of frustrated participants marched through Manhattan to the New York Police Department headquarters. This month the NYPD will begin wearing body cameras, which many hope will bring greater transparency to policing.
But more and more communities across the country are responding by creating groups to monitor police behavior, hoping to spark reform. In New York City several cop watch groups are organized under the Communities United for Police Reform coalition, and independent efforts like El Grito de Sunset Park have also emerged.
“You hear that?” asked Flores. The group’s members paused, ears perked, and peered down a darkened side street, but a siren turned out to be only a passing ambulance. The streets were mostly quiet as the group walked deeper into Sunset Park and then over to Sixth Avenue, making a large loop through the neighborhood.
From Galluzo’s experiences, he believes the cops target unarmed citizens and the military fights true injustices abroad. Maybe the Marines could be part of his future, he concluded. His father has given him permission to sign up but he’s reluctant to tell his mother, pregnant with her ninth child. Still, he occasionally visits a recruiting office on Flatbush Avenue to prepare for the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the multiple-choice test required for entry.
As a police car drove down the street in front of them, Flores instructed the group: “Cameras out!” Each cop watcher pointed his lens toward the vehicle, capturing the plate number. For Flores, cop watching is as much preemptive as prescriptive. He keeps a private log of every police car, badge number and officer working in the precinct, so that if anything transpires he can identify the cop responsible.
Minutes later, when a police van drove by and Flores started reading aloud the numbers on the side, one of the officers leaned out the window to mock him, repeating the numbers himself, louder. “What’s your badge number?” Flores shouted as the van drove off, the officers laughing inside.
Relations between the police and the community have never been particularly good in Sunset Park, but in 2004 the cops arrested 19 kids at the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Grainy black and white footage shows a throng of cops tangling with a group of kids, then driving them back with steady streams of mace. Flores later dubbed them the Sunset Park 19. Those arrests prompted him to start El Grito de Sunset Park that year.
“The kids in this neighborhood are hassled by cops all year long,” he said, speaking especially of the area’s Latino population. The parade day is a time for them to let loose and proudly celebrate their culture, but this can also lead to provocations.
On the afternoon of June 8, 2014, Galluzo and 15 members of his extended family walked the few blocks from his grandmother’s house to join the growing crowds on Fifth Avenue celebrating the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Dressed in matching T-shirts emblazoned with the island’s red, white and blue flag, they blew plastic whistles and blasted music along the way. Scores of police officers were clustered on street corners, and Galluzo watched as a cop pulled up, warning one of his relatives not to wave flags in the street.
Galluzo couldn’t help responding, “Why you worrying about us? There’s people dying out there, and you’re worried about us just holding a flag?”
He and his family continued to the park on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. There musicians pounded steadily on wooden pandero drums, playing the traditional Puerto Rican bomba and plena music that is popular throughout the Caribbean. Lost in the crowd of swishing hips and clapping hands, Galluzo watched as people danced and handed out flags. But later, as they began walking home from the celebrations, cop cars and vans whizzed by. Galluzo and his family ran toward one of his uncles, Timmy Gutierrez, who was in handcuffs. He was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, obstructing governmental administration, resisting arrest and unlawful possession of marijuana, according to the NYPD.
Galluzo asked officers what had happened but received no response. He and some of his family members reflexively hurled a string of insults at the cops. “Fuck you! Fuck your mother!” he remembers saying. His grandmother tried to calm them, directing the family to go home and saying they would bail out Gutierrez later.
But as the streets became more chaotic, the family ran into more cops on Sixth Avenue. “Go home,” one of the officers allegedly told Galluzo’s uncle Kevin, 15, knocking his hat off of his head. Several relatives rushed to intervene, hoping to prevent a confrontation. Galluzo yelled that they were already going home. But Kevin then felt a cop throw him to the ground to cuff him, he said.
Flores was one of several cop watchers who took footage of the scene that night. The videos show chaotic crowds being pushed and shoved and the cops aggressively trying to clear the streets.
In this commotion, Galluzo saw a cop point at him. “He had a death stare like he wanted to hurt me so bad,” he recalled.
Galluzo said the cop grabbed him and slammed him against the hood of a white police van before forcing him to the ground. The cop allegedly smacked his face against the pavement several more times before a cousin pulled him away. Galluzo escaped arrest in the crowd, but the officer’s face remains imprinted in his mind. His father, a towering Italian man with an intimidating presence, arrived and told a friend to take Galluzo home. Not daring to disagree, Galluzo turned around and left.
Tina Luongo
head attorney, Legal Aid Society
A spokeswoman for Sunset Park’s 72nd Precinct said she isn’t authorized to discuss any of these alleged incidents, and requests to the NYPD’s Department of Public Information for comment were not returned. But another of El Grito de Sunset Park’s cop watch videos from this year’s parade reveals some of the officers’ frustrations as they tried to clear the streets at this year’s parade. Flores, holding the camera, said repeatedly, “We are moving back.”
The police were not impressed. Amid the din, the lens focused for a minute on the face of a young officer with dark hair and bushy eyebrows. He said, “You’re walking backwards in the middle of the streets. Does that make sense? Just turn around and walk! It’s so easy!”
“Would you turn your back on your enemy?” asked Flores.
“You’re so busy filming that it beats all common sense!”
“Well if you put your hands on us, we gotta film it.”
“Oh, boy … you got the most boring movie of all time on your cellphone.”
When Bill de Blasio became mayor earlier this year, he replaced Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose tenure was marked by the controversial stop-and-frisk tactics. De Blasio then hired William Bratton, who served under Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s. At Giuliani’s direction, Bratton ran the NYPD under the broken-window strategy, in which small crimes are targeted to prevent bigger crimes. But groups like New Yorkers Against Bratton view him as representative of a system that still disproportionately targets people of color.
Bratton is well aware of his critics. At a recent talk at the New York University School of Law, he addressed them, saying, “The city has never been safer.” Since 1994, murder is down 83 percent, rape is down 58 percent, and burglaries are down 83 percent, he said. But Bratton acknowledged that many minorities do not feel safer.
“There’s a cloud hanging over about 15 of our 77 precincts,” he said. These precincts are where there is the most crime and poverty but also where the NYPD is putting more of its attention on policing. While he said that his challenge was to gain back the trust of these communities, he characterized the NYPD as “one of the most restrained police departments in the country.”
Still, Bratton has had to reprimand some officers in the last few months. He suspended Vincent Ciardiello of the 72nd Precinct for 30 days in September when the footage emerged of Ciardiello kicking Daza. When reached at his Staten Island home by telephone, Ciardiello, who is back on regular duty, said only, “I have no idea what you’re talking about” before hanging up. Further calls were not answered.
On a Thursday evening in November, a cop’s gun went off in the East New York projects — accidentally, according to Bratton — fatally wounding 28-year-old Akai Gurley. Gurley died in a stairwell of the Pink Houses in a desolate swath of Brooklyn that borders Queens.
The members of El Grito de Sunset Park responded quickly to the latest shooting in New York of an unarmed black man by a police officer. They attended a march in East New York after Gurley’s death and joined the crowd that formed slowly in the projects at about 7 p.m. “How do you spell racist? NYPD,” people chanted. “NYPD, KKK, how many kids have you killed today?”
Ashia Bomani Ojore grabbed the megaphone, calling for people to get involved in a cop watch group that the activist organization Black Autonomous North East was forming in the Pink Houses. The group has begun patrolling the projects and the surrounding neighborhood several times a week.
Tina Luongo is the head attorney of the criminal division of the Legal Aid Society, a not-for-profit legal firm that handles 220,000 criminal cases every year. She often hears about police abuse from her clients, but in her years practicing she’s had a difficult time getting district attorneys and juries to believe it really happens.
“It’s only been since citizens have started documenting it with their phones and loading it online — when they are tired and frustrated enough to record it — that the conversation has changed,” she said.
Luongo sees the grass-roots work of cop watch groups like El Grito and Black Autonomous North East as critical to improving the NYPD by increasing awareness of the problem but also argues that activism must be paired with policy work to create systematic change. She points to Legal Aid’s new Cop Accountability Project, which tracks complaints against cops and can help expose a wider problem than individual incidents and to City Council reform initiatives.
Just a few days after Gurley was killed, Galluzo learned of the grand jury’s decision in Missouri from his father.
“These cops are always going to get away with the crime they do because they have a piece of metal on their chest,” his dad said. “We’re never going to win with the cops.”
Galluzo hasn’t joined the protests over Gurley or Garner in recent weeks. He’s trying to figure out his next steps after graduation, especially with a baby brother on the way. When he finally told his mom he was thinking about enlisting, she was upset. He still wants to join the Marines — or maybe the Navy — but is considering film classes at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology next year to make a film about policing issues.
He called the Garner decision “scary” and worries what could happen in his community or at next year’s parade. Maybe it would empower the police to act even more aggressively toward his family and community, he thinks.
Still, it’s not enough to keep him from attending next year. “Hell yeah, I’m going to be there,” he said.
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