Thread by @doctorow

In New York City, the summer 2020 #BLM uprising became a grotesque spectacle, as legions of ultraviolent cops committed mass-scale, criminal human rights violations, spawning a new subgenre of viral video: the NYPD BLM violence video.

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During and after this period, public attention focused on the systemic nature of the NYPD's lawlessness, like the fact that the cops' disciplinary records were held secret, obscuring the repeat offenders.

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Indeed, @Propublica's brave publication of these records demonstrated that the force is riddled with violent, habitual sadists.

pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/…

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Propublica did incredible work, showing that cops who commits a strings of violent human rights abuses and cost the taxpayer vast fortunes in legal settlements aren't disqualified from promotions - these monsters constitute the NYPD's top brass.

pluralistic.net/2020/09/10/boo…

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Propublica also delved deep into the NYPD's sham of a disciplinary process, for example, documenting the continued use of illegal choke-holds by officers, primarily against Black men, and how police officials did nothing to enforce their own policies.

pluralistic.net/2021/01/21/i-c…

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All of this leads up to impunity. As Propublica went on to report, out of the hundreds the NYPD officers caught on video committing crimes against protesters, only TWO were brought up for discipline, despite video evidence and eyewitness reports.

pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/new…

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The cherry on the cake: last month, Propublica revealed the existence of a secretive, tax-funded slushfund that pays out millions to hire white-shoe lawyers to defend the cops who are so dirty the city refuses to defend them:

pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/ove…

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Latent in all of this discussion is the assumption - on the part of NYPD critics AND apologists - that the cops who commit these crimes are breaking their own rules. But as it turns out, that's not true.

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Today, @theintercept published the leaked, secret, destroy-after-reading procedural manuals for the NYPD's Strategic Response Group, an ultra-secretive good squad formed by former chief Bill Bratton in 2015.

theintercept.com/2021/04/07/nyp…

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We don't know how big the SRG is - it's a secret - but we know that its inaugural budget was $13m in 2015 and today, it's nearly $90m. As @alicesperi and @JohnBolgerNYC write, the crimes we witnessed last summer are literally straight out of the SRG's playbook.

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That thing where bike cops kettle a group of protesters, hoist their bikes up to their chest, forming a moving fence, and then beat the shit out of protesters as they advance? That's not the result of undertraining - it's a maneuver they regularly drill.

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When the BLM uprising began, the NYPD's chief and commissioner both pledged that the SRG - theoretically designed to maintain order during mass riots, not political protests - wouldn't be involved.

They lied.

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"Investigators found a disproportionate number of SRG officers accused of wrongdoing to have exceeded their legal authority, when compared with the wider department."

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Despite its $90m budget and estimated 700 cops, it's not clear why SRG exists at all. The NY AG's office said SRG shouldn't be used on protesters because they're supposed to fight terrorism, but the NYPD already has an expensive, heavily resourced Counterterrorism Bureau.

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One thing we do know about the SRG: they have a huge intelligence wing. Before deployments, SRG officers are briefed on "group size, planned arrests, key members of the protest group, and the group’s hierarchy," and other intel. They go in with a plan.

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That's the point: the violence isn't the result of rogue cops ignoring their training. It's the result of cops doing EXACTLY what they're trained to do.

If you doubt it, read the manuals.

documentcloud.org/documents/2058…

documentcloud.org/documents/2058…

documentcloud.org/documents/2058…

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Learn about the Bike Line Arrest Manuever, or BLAM, in which officers "shout 'BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!' as they advance," and "[take] control of subjects head by clinching your hands and arms behind the head of subject and bringing head against your chest."

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This is exactly what @hrw documented in their report on a Jun 4, 2020 "planned assault" in the Bronx. NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea called the chaotic violence of that assault as "a plan which was executed nearly flawlessly." He wasn't lying.

hrw.org/news/2020/09/3…

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The authors warn that any reform that results in disbanding the SRG won't be enough: the NYPD has a long history of dissolving its most criminal units and then reforming them with a new name, new insignia and even bigger budgets.

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They give the final word to @JooHyun_Kang of @CPRAction, who says that the real problem isn't the SRG, it's "the hyper-militarization, the hyper-aggressive policing tactics. That’s not an SRG problem only, that’s an NYPD problem"

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cru…