Is NYPD Running Wild? Patterns of Brutality Raise Questions About Mayor's Control of Police

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PIX11 spoke to one resident who, was cooking during the forced entry and said that the NYPD did not identify themselves: "...they did not scream ‘police.’"

Even though the police did not have a warrant, Graham’s landlord, Paulette Minzie, said police put a gun in her face and searched her home for weapons. “What’s clear,” Minzie’s attorney, Neville Mitchel, told NY1, “is that there was enough time for them to reflect on what is happening, and this tragedy should not have happened."

Intimidation

Javin James, 31, was in his apartment when something drew him to the window. He watched police officers stop and frisk Jateik Reed and two of his friends. Sitting with me in a neighbor’s car, James told me what he saw.

“They’re searching the guys, then I see one of them get dropped,” James told me. Pointing to his window, across the street from where Reed was beat, James explained that after police dropped him, Reed was behind an NYPD van, and James could not see what happened behind it. Then he said, the violence escalated. He said he saw police beat Reed as he hung off the curb, before picking him up and dragging him over toward the wall. “I was yelling that they could have cuffed him five minutes ago,” he told me.

When James heard a cop ask what apartment number he was in, he walked away from the window. James told me that some other police officers then busted down his door.

As James told New York One:

"When they surrounded me and looked at me with gloves on, I knew what was going to happen. I just had time to pull my glasses off. And by the time I did that, it was 'boom' [with a punch]. I did [put up my hands] like that to shield my face immediately. I tried to protect my face. I'm shielding my face and this is exposed. He uses his right leg and stomps me here [in the torso]."

Then, Javin James says an officer tried to intimidate him into silence. “I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like ‘Tell me now that you saw something,’” James said. He told me that he needs physical therapy twice a week to treat the muscle spasms in his neck and back.

But no amount of physical therapy can undo the harm that police have inflicted on Patricia Hartley. After she watched her grandson, Ramarley Graham, die, police who fired far too fast did not make an attempt to comfort her.

Instead, according to the New York Daily News:

Patricia Hartley said police threw her to the ground and stuck a gun in her face after Ramarley Graham, 18, was killed inside the bathroom of his family’s Bronx apartment.

Then, the Daily News says, Hartley was held in police custody for seven hours.

Assemblyman Eric Stevenson, D-Bronx, told the Daily News that Hartley was also being denied access to her heart medication. “I asked the district attorney a simple question: ‘Is this woman being held against her will?’” he told the Daily News. “Within 10 minutes, she was released.”

When Reed’s family went to the 42nd Precinct to find out why he was so badly beaten, police arrested and allegedly roughed them up as well.

Schuan Reed, Jateik Reed’s mother, and his brother, Jashawn, told me the violence started when they were on their way out. Schuan had been asking the officers if she could speak to the captain, but they would only give her the sergeant. “I didn’t want to speak to the sergeant. The sergeant was involved in the incident,” she told me.

Finally, they got ready to leave. “If you open the gate, it slams,” Schuan said. “I went through the gate.” Then, she says, officers came up behind them, asking her son Jashawn, “Did you slam the fucking gate?”

“I’m a grown woman,” she said, “That’s my son. If you have something to say to him, you say it to me.” Frustrated, Reed said she replied, “No, he didn’t slam the gate. He didn’t slam the fucking gate.”

Jashawn said one cop pushed him. Schuan said the officers egged on Jashawn, and “took the handcuffs off him like they wanted my son to fight them.”

“I told another cop I’m going to press charges on this officer because he pushed me,” Jashawn said. That’s when they say police dropped them. “He threw me on the floor, put his foot on top of my head, punched me in the face,” Jashawn said. “They also threw my friend [Will] on the floor --  that was at the scene when they beat up Jateik -- stepped all over him. The cop slapped my mom, called her a black bitch.”