The Bronx Defenders have filed two separate lawsuits against the NYPD and New York City alleging a pattern of racist police misconduct toward Black and brown New Yorkers, including one lawsuit against the Bronx Narcotics Unit, a unit for which the city paid out roughly $23 million in misconduct claims over the last decade.
Both cases were filed on Feb. 28 in the U.S. Southern District Court, and according to the Bronx Defenders, are case in point of the NYPD and the city allowing “a brushfire of racist misconduct to continue to burn.” Each lawsuit is seeking punitive damages to be determined at a jury trial.
The first case involves Albert Williams, a 60-year-old Black man who alleges that nine plainclothes officers from the Bronx Narcotics Unit assaulted him in his apartment on Nov. 30, 2020, during an interaction with an undercover officer. According to the lawsuit, Williams states that the undercover officer who initially approached him at his Bronx home did not identify himself as police and demanded drugs.
When Williams attempted to flee the apartment, he said he was flanked by eight undercover officers who pinned him to the ground, hurled racial slurs at him and began physically assaulting him when he was apprehended on the street. Charges, however, were ultimately dropped for lack of sufficient evidence, according to a source familiar with the proceedings.
“They punched, kicked, and stomped him repeatedly while he was prone on the ground with his hands behind his back. Then they held him in handcuffs against the back of their van while punching him in the groin and calling him ‘n*****,’ an excerpt from the lawsuit reads.
According to the Bronx Defenders, a firm which defends low-income Bronx residents in criminal, civil, child welfare and immigration cases, none of the officers involved in the altercation were disciplined. But since 2013, the city has paid more than $5 million in settlements against the Bronx Narcotics Unit for unlawful force…
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