Ashley Southall

Officers often then searched the detainees — the vast majority of whom were young black and Latino men — for weapons that rarely materialized.

The encounters were part of a controversial program known as “stop-and-frisk,” which defined policing under Bloomberg.

As Bloomberg, the 108th mayor of New York, lays the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign, his legacy with stop-and-frisk has emerged as a vulnerability for him on the campaign trail.

On Sunday, he apologized for his role in promoting a policy during his time in office that eroded trust of the police in black and Latino neighborhoods.

“Our focus was on saving lives,” he said during a speech at a black church in Brooklyn. “But the fact is: Far too many innocent people were being stopped.”

Here’s why the program was and remains a divisive issue in New York.

What is ‘Stop-and-Frisk’?

Stop-and-frisk is a crime-prevention strategy that had been a staple of policing in the United States for more than 30 years before Bloomberg took office. It allows police officers to detain someone for questioning on the street, in public housing projects or in private buildings where landlords request police patrols.

Officers are required to have reasonable belief that the person is, has been or is about to be involved in a crime. If police officers believe the detainee is armed, an officer can conduct a frisk by passing his hands over the person’s outer garments.

The strategy spread with the adoption of the data-driven Compstat management system in the 1990s, which allowed police to track and respond to crime trends in real time.

After taking office in 2002, Bloomberg oversaw a dramatic expansion in the use of stop-and-frisk. The number of stops multiplied sevenfold, peaking with 685,724 in 2011 and then tumbling to 191,851 in 2013. During Bloomberg’s three terms, the police recorded 5,081,689 stops.

“The temperature in the city at the time was that the police were at war with black and brown people on the streets,” said Jenn Rolnick-Borchetta, the director of impact litigation at the Bronx Defenders, one of the groups that has successfully sued the Police Department over the practice. “And that is how people experienced it.”

Why did Bloomberg support it?

At the same time that officers were conducting more searches as part of stop-and-frisk, crime continued to decline, a correlation that Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, viewed as cause and effect. The two men said stop-and-frisk was helping to take guns off the street and reduce violence across the city.

Statistics appeared to back them up: In 2002, Bloomberg’s first year in office, the number of murders in the city fell below 600, and dropped to 335 by the time he left office in 2013. Even as the amount of crime rose or fluctuated in other cities, New York’s crime rate declined, continuing a streak that had begun in 1991.

Bloomberg and Kelly fiercely defended stop-and-frisk in the face of criticism and legal challenges. They argued that it was an essential practice for police, and predicted — wrongly, it would turn out — that curtailing it would lead to a dramatic rise in crime.

“Look at what’s happened in Boston,” Bloomberg said in 2013. “Remember what happened here on 9/11. Remember all of those who’ve been killed by gun violence and the families they left behind.”

Opponents said it was racist and counterproductive

But more factors affect crime trends than just police tactics, and critics of the program said that under Bloomberg it gave officers overly broad discretion to target mostly black and Latino boys and men for stops.

In 2009, black and Latino people in New York were nine times as likely to be stopped by the police compared with white residents.

The strategy was used with such intensity that officers in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville conducted 52,000 stops over eight square blocks between January 2006 and March 2010 — the equivalent of one stop for each resident there every year. The arrest rate was less than 1% for the 14,000 residents.

The policy resulted in a series of lawsuits by black and Latino men. One man, Nicholas Peart, described being held at gunpoint on his 18th birthday as an officer passed his hand over the young man’s groin and buttocks before leaving without an explanation — one of five times he had been stopped by the police.

“Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself up against a wall or on the ground with an officer’s gun at my head,” he wrote in The Times. “For a black man in his 20s like me, it’s just a fact of life in New York.”

Only 14 out of every 10,000 stops conducted during the Bloomberg era turned up a gun, and just 1,200 ended with a fine, an arrest or the seizure of an illegal weapon, according to police data analyzed by the New York Civil Liberties Union. A Columbia University professor said the stops were no better at producing gun seizures than chance.

Black and Latino people were more likely be to stopped and frisked, even though their white counterparts were twice as likely to be found with a gun, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“This is where the racial bias is particularly clear,” Christopher Dunn, the legal director of the group, said.

And a judge said it was illegal

The controversy culminated with a federal judge in Manhattan ruling in 2013 that the searches amounted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling” of black and Latino people. The ruling covered three concurrent cases.

According to data and testimony presented at trial, the police targeted black and Latino males as young as 13 for being in neighborhoods with high crime rates or for making “furtive” movements — a loosely defined term that encapsulated virtually any type of behavior, such as sitting on benches, looking over a shoulder or going into a building with a broken front door. Dissenting officers described being pressured to make stops to meet numerical quotas.

The city argued in court that a stop that did not result in a summons, arrest or weapons seizure still prevented crime by discouraging people from carrying guns.

“That was the theory that Bloomberg supported, that if you let them know that they might be stopped anytime, anywhere, that they will stop bringing out their guns,” the judge who made the ruling, Shira Scheindlin, now a private mediator and lawyer, said Sunday.

Bloomberg defended the practice as recently as January, denying any racial bias in the policy by pointing to the drop in murders during his time in office.

He struck a different tone on Sunday.

“I got something important really wrong,” he said at the Christian Cultural Center, a black megachurch in Brooklyn. “I didn’t understand back then the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities.”

Crime continued to fall after the policy was abandoned

Stop-and-frisk became a key issue in the 2013 mayoral race. Mayor Bill de Blasio won a long-shot campaign that year in part because he promised to undo the heavy-handed policing tactics of the Bloomberg administration.

During the campaign, Bloomberg criticized the attacks on stop-and-frisk as political showmanship that risked people’s lives. But his predictions about what would happen if the strategy was eliminated were wrong.

During de Blasio’s first term as mayor, stops decreased by 76%, to 11,627 in 2017, from 45,787 in his first year. At the same time, crime fell to levels not seen since the 1950s. Over the last two years, the city has logged fewer than 300 murders annually.

Where stop-and-frisk stands now

Bloomberg appealed Scheindlin’s ruling, but de Blasio agreed to implement court-ordered reforms. The changes included mandating most officers to wear body cameras and the entire force to be trained in de-escalating conflict and recognizing their own bias.

But racial disparities persist in the street-stop program, and a federal monitor overseeing reforms has repeatedly raised concerns that officers and supervisors do not document and review stops in accordance with Police Department policy. The monitor, Peter L. Zimroth, said the failures impeded efforts to make sure reforms were taking hold.

“Addressing the persistent problem of underreporting of stops and the failure of supervisors to deal with that underreporting and the quality of the stop reports that are filed must be part of that effort,” Zimroth said.

This article originally appeared in

Why 'Stop-and-Frisk' Inflamed Black and Hispanic Neighborhoods

During Michael R. Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor of New York City, police officers stopped and questioned people they believed to be engaged in criminal activity on the street more than 5 million times.

Dominique Jefferson said he spotted a man reaching into his pants and thought the stranger was going for a gun.

Nearby stood Jason Pagan, a 38-year-old reputed member of the Bloods street gang who had gotten out of prison six months earlier after serving time for a gun charge.

Seconds later, Pagan was fatally shot.

The shooting also wounded 11 other people, jolting a city where violence has declined but where gang feuds have fueled a rise in shootings that have killed and wounded more than a dozen bystanders this year, including a 7-year-old, police say. Investigators were looking for at least two people linked to Saturday’s shooting but had made no arrests as of Tuesday evening.

The gunfire started a few minutes before 11 p.m. after partygoers had sung “Family Reunion” by the O’Jays and had begun filing home from the Brownsville Playground, at Hegeman and Christopher avenues. Some in the crowd used canes, walkers and wheelchairs. But younger groups of people were just arriving and congregating on the playground, witnesses said.

Friends had been inviting Pagan to the block party in Brooklyn for years, they said, and on Saturday night, he finally had agreed to stop by on his way to another gathering.

“I gave him a great big hug,” said Raven Fason, who described herself as a close friend of Pagan.

Witnesses told the police that Pagan, 38, got into an argument with two men — one in a button-down shirt and the other in a white shirt and dark shorts, who was seen holding a gun.

Davis, 55, a retired coach for the Police Athletic League, said he heard a woman’s voice warning, “They getting ready to start.” Before anyone could run, he said, the shooting started.

“All you heard was pow-pow-pow-pow-pow,” he said. “I turned back around to head to where my friend was. I took about two steps and I got hit in the back.”

The flash of gunfire lit up Pagan’s face, Fason said, and then the shooter, who was hard to see in the darkness, turned the gun on people who were fleeing. “He started shooting into the crowd,” she said. “All I see was the flashes going off.”

Someone fired back, possibly Pagan, the police said. Shell casings from the scene indicated at least two weapons engaged in crossfire. One firearm was recovered.

Tony Bonet, 44, said he heard two initial shots — “pop, pop!” — followed after a pause by a barrage of shots. “We saw people dropping in front of us. It was like something out of TV,” he said.

Pandemonium broke out. “They were running every different kind of way,” said Michael Thomas, a retired police officer who was near a performance stage on Hegeman Avenue. “I was afraid for the people that couldn’t run, people who had canes, wheelchairs, babies.”

Investigators said several of the victims — who ranged in age from 21 to 55 — had gang ties, including Pagan, who they believe was a member of the Bloods. He was released on parole in January after he was caught with a .40-caliber handgun in 2016, and law enforcement officials said he was a suspect in a previous shooting.

“There’s a lot of information coming in, but it’s still very preliminary,” Dermot Shea, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, said Monday.

A list of the victims’ injuries provided by the police suggested a worse tragedy was narrowly averted. Two of the surviving victims were shot in the head and six were struck in the torso, according to the list.

One of the bullets hit Daniesa Murdaugh in the back as she fled. Doctors told her they believed that somehow the slug had lost enough velocity — perhaps after ricocheting off her bra strap — to prevent it from entering her body, she said. “It terrifies me,” said Murdaugh, 21.

The bullet that hit Davis missed his spine by inches. He said police officers who put pressure on his wound saved his life.

The gunfire shattered a normally peaceful homecoming for current and former residents of Brownsville. It came a little more than a day before a young white supremacist opened fire at a garlic festival in California, killing three people. Many New Yorkers drew a comparison between the two attacks, although Mayor Bill de Blasio resisted calling the one in Brooklyn a mass shooting, saying “that phrase is usually reserved for a different type of situation.”

The mayor’s comment drew scorn from community leaders and elected Democrats in Brooklyn, some of whom said the mayor was playing down its gravity because of his presidential aspirations. “I think that’s a political liability for him,” said Assemblyman Charles Barron, a Brooklyn Democrat.

Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, said that calling the incident a mass shooting would draw more aid to Brownsville. “When it’s called a mass shooting, there’s an outpouring of support and resources that goes to that community,” he said.

Freddi Goldstein, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said de Blasio was waiting for the Police Department to determine the motive for the shooting and its intended targets. “That will indicate whether it is identified as a mass shooting,” she said.

Violent crime has declined more than 75% in the neighborhood since 1993, when there were 74 homicides. Still, Brownsville is one of nine areas where crime rates remain twice the citywide average, according to the police. Gang feuds are linked to half the homicides and shootings in the neighborhood, police have said.

Less than a mile from where Pagan was killed, a familiar grief was sinking in at an apartment building on Sutter Avenue, where Pagan had lived on the ninth floor with his grandmother. His family had been through this before: His younger brother, George Moore, who was known as Joey, was killed in 2007.

Just outside the building were dozens of votive candles, and a few large color photographs of Pagan striking poses in stylish jeans, sneakers, ball caps and, in one, a sweater.

The version of Pagan that law enforcement officials described was not the side he showed to his neighbors, who remembered him as an amiable father of two children.

“He was a real good dude, didn’t bother nobody,” Mo Johnson, 32, said as he scrawled a message in red marker on a poster hung outside the building to memorialize Pagan.

“He wasn’t a troublemaker kid,” said Raul Salaman, 53, “but he hung out with thugs.”

Pagan was arrested in 2016 and pleaded guilty to a weapons charge that led to a two-year prison term, officials said.

Pagan seemed the kind of person that Davis, a native of Brownsville, had spent his life trying to help.

Before he retired in 2007, Davis, who goes by the nickname “Lottie,” coached basketball for the Police Athletic League on Rockaway Avenue and held tournaments at the Brownsville Recreation Center, located near the park where the shooting unfolded after Saturday’s festivities. He had lived across the street for more than 20 years and coached flag football in his spare time.

After retiring, Davis worked for about two years at the Democratic Club, where he ran youth programs. His main goal, he said, was to enroll young people in a summer jobs program, and he often dialed up friends at City Hall to squeeze in teenagers whose applications were rejected.

“I showed them that there were other ways to survive,” Davis said. “And the way to survive is to use your community.”

The police commissioner, James O’Neill, said he had heard the same diagnosis from other community leaders in high-crime neighborhoods: Idleness and unemployment contribute to violence. “There is not enough to do,” O’Neill said, “or the programs that are out there —they don’t know about.”

For Davis, the pain of the shooting is twofold. First, there is the bullet still lodged in his back that doctors could not extract. (He was released from the hospital late Sunday with painkillers.) Then, there is the violence that still plagues Brownsville despite efforts to stop it.

The gunmen, he said, failed to grasp the deep “detriment” they had caused to the community by opening fire at an event meant to celebrate peace and surviving tough circumstances.

“I was just disappointed in these individuals,” he said. “They don’t understand what Brownsville Old Timers really meant.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/nyregion/brooklyn-shooting.html" id="7e8679c9-f760-36a2-aebc-01d316aad2eb">The New York Times</a>.

How a Brooklyn Rite of Summer Ended in Bloodshed

NEW YORK — Anthony Davis said he had just parted ways with an old friend at the Brownsville Old Timers Day block party when he heard a woman warn that a fight was about to break out.

Instead, at least two gunmen opened fire as the neighborhood block party in Brownsville was winding down late Saturday, killing a 38-year-old man and wounding 11 people in the crossfire, authorities said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in a news conference Sunday morning at the scene, lamented the violence at an event that had been held “successfully and peacefully” for decades and “had been an example of everything good about Brownsville.”

More than 100 police officers were on duty at the party when the shots rang out minutes before 11 p.m. near the intersection of Christopher and Hegeman avenues, where about 2,000 people had gathered in and near a playground, police said.

The man who died was shot in the head as he waited for an Uber to take him home after Old Timers Day, which has endured without violence since its inception in 1963, according to police and Assemblywoman Latrice M. Walker, a native of Brownsville who left the party less than an hour before the shooting.

The shooting quickly eclipsed what was becoming a success story in Brownsville, a neighborhood scarred by decades of official neglect, deep poverty and street violence. Shootings had been declining this year in the neighborhood despite a slight rise in gun violence across the city.

Walker said the shooting death was a painful turn of events on an already somber occasion for her family. Her brother, she said, was shot and killed 32 years ago to the day. The victim of Sunday’s shooting, she added, was the second of his siblings to die by gun violence.

“I’m hurt,” Walker said. “I’m mourning.”

Police did not say whether any of the victims — who ranged in age from 21 to 55 — had been the targets of the gunfire, or if the gunmen had indiscriminately strafed the crowd with bullets.

One of the most seriously injured partygoers remained in critical condition Sunday at an area hospital. Other victims remained hospitalized in serious condition, and several had been treated for their injuries and released, the police said.

Police said detectives were still searching for the gunmen and investigating whether the motive for the violence stemmed from a gang dispute. A gun was found at the scene, but investigators had not determined if it was used in the shooting, police officials said.

Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill asked people who had been in the playground to send any videos from before, during or after the shooting.

“Please, please turn that over to us,” he said. “It would be very helpful.”

Videos circulating online after the mayhem show police trying to gain control of a chaotic and sprawling crime scene full of residents and strewn with food containers, bottles, chairs and tables. The bloodshed turned police cars into ambulances as officers helped rush victims to the hospital, police and fire officials said.

The shooting disrupted what in many New York City neighborhoods is an annual summer ritual. Even in some of the city’s grittiest neighborhoods, warm-weather block parties draw neighbors outside for conversation, food and drinks, games and music. Saturday’s Old Timers Day block party capped more than a week of festivities that included musical performances, a fashion and talent show and a street festival.

Shootings in Brownsville have declined from last year, and fewer people have been struck by gunfire, according to police data through July 21, the most recent available.

Brownsville’s decline in shootings has defied a rise in violence in other parts of northern Brooklyn that the police have said has contributed to the citywide uptick in shootings. Overall in New York, there have been more shootings and slightly more people struck by gunfire this year compared with the same period in 2018, according to police data.

Brownsville drew renewed attention last week after video surfaced of a man there pouring a pail of water over a police officer’s head. The video was one of at least four that escalated a public debate about how restrained officers should be when they are humiliated or taunted by the public.

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, said Saturday night’s shooting stemmed from the city’s failure to support anti-violence programs that work in crevices of the city where violence remains stubbornly high. He called for more funding for programs that have been proven to defuse tension before it escalates.

The city spends $36 million on such programs, but Adams said that is barely half what is needed. Additionally, he said the city is often late to pay groups that do the work, leaving them unable to pay staff members who risk their lives walking into combustible situations.

De Blasio, at the news conference, vowed to increase funding and interagency support for the city’s Cure Violence programs, describing the goal of getting guns off the streets as “our most essential mission.”

Local officials said they had complained for years that the city was not doing enough to target its pockets where violence remains persistently high. Some of the anti-violence programs still encounter opposition from hospitals and city agencies, but resistance is most acute from the police, said Adams, a retired New York Police Department captain and the co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.

De Blasio has embraced a neighborhood policing program designed by O’Neill, and the two frequently speak of crime-fighting as a two-way process that requires the police and civilians to work together. But Adams said that in some places, an antiquated mindset persists among some officers.

“Those terms about community and police coming together, those are bumper stickers and slogans,” he said, adding it is “not a reality in all communities.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/nyregion/brooklyn-shooting-brownsville-park.html" id="77293b60-fd27-3153-aced-5b906dcb23e7">The New York Times</a>.

Gunmen Fire Into Crowd at Block Party, Killing 1 and Injuring 11

NEW YORK — The organizers of the 56th annual Old Timers Day in Brooklyn welcomed the thousands of people expected at the beloved event with one word of caution: “All r welcome let’s come in peace,” a photo caption attached to a Facebook flyer read.

Outrage continued to grow Wednesday as the police arrested three men who were seen on video hurling water over the weekend in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The officers had been sent to disperse disorderly groups at fire hydrants during a three-day heat wave and in both incidents left without arresting the assailants, who were egged on by bystanders.

The police were still seeking at least one other man involved in one of the incidents, in Harlem, where an officer was struck in the head as he was handcuffing a man with an open arrest warrant on the back of a car.

Police officers are often accused of using too much force, as the proliferation of cellphone cameras makes it easy for people to record and share events online. But the recent videos prompted a rare rebuke from the Police Department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, who said the officers had put up with too much.

“Any cop who thinks that’s all right, that they can walk away from something like that, maybe should reconsider whether or not this is the profession for them,” said Terence Monahan, the chief of department. “We don’t take that.”

His comments followed a Police Department memo reminding officers that while courts give civilians wide leeway to heap verbal abuse on officers, physical acts like dousing or spraying water could result in a variety of charges: obstructing governmental administration, criminal tampering, harassment and disorderly conduct. If an officer’s equipment is damaged, it is also possible to file a charge of criminal mischief, the memo said.

Police officials said one of the men arrested Wednesday, Courtney Thompson, 28, of Brooklyn, was seen on video dumping water on an officer’s head in the borough’s Brownsville neighborhood Saturday. Two other men, Isaiah Scott, 23, and Chad Bowen, 28, were charged after they were recorded hurling water at officers making an arrest Sunday in Harlem, the police said. All were in custody and could not be reached for comment.

Thompson was charged with obstructing government administration, disorderly conduct and harassment; Scott, of Roebling, New Jersey, was charged with criminal mischief for throwing water at a woman and damaging her phone; Bowen, of Harlem, was also charged with criminal mischief.

All three men had prior arrests, and Thompson, who the police said is a member of the “Brownsville Fresh Gangstas,” a Crips subset, is on probation for a 2015 robbery. His lengthy rap sheet included an arrest in March on charges he assaulted a police officer during a traffic stop.

Before the arrests, the police commissioner, James O’Neill, said the city and the Police Department would “never tolerate such disrespect.”

Donovan Richards, the chairman of the City Council committee that oversees the Police Department, said Monahan’s remarks were troubling because they criticized the officers for doing what the department preaches: exercising restraint. He said that while the men’s actions were “reprehensible,” the officers deserved to be commended for avoiding a needless confrontation that could have spiraled out of control.

“These officers shouldn’t publicly be ridiculed,” he said. “They did the right thing. They defused a situation that could have been worse.”

The videos were widely circulated and hotly debated after they were posted on Instagram. On Twitter, Vice President Mike Pence joined a chorus of public officials who condemned what he called “disgraceful” attacks.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, traded barbs with his Republican predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, over which mayor’s policies were to blame.

Giuliani, who as mayor initiated an era of aggressive enforcement for minor offenses, suggested that de Blasio’s decision to reverse that policy was to blame for the disrespect shown to the police. De Blasio shot back that crime rates were low “because we're bridging the divide between police and communities.”

Conservative politicians and two of the city’s largest police unions seized on the videos as evidence of the perils of recent efforts to roll back enforcement that targets low-level crime. The Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, a former police officer, and 26 other prominent black New Yorkers signed an open letter published Wednesday condemning the attacks and calling on neighbors to respect the Police Department “when its officers are lawfully doing exactly what we have asked them to do.”

Patrick Lynch, the president of the city’s largest police union, said criminals have been emboldened by some district attorneys’ refusal to prosecute low-level crimes like fare evasion and marijuana possession, as well as recently enacted state and local laws requiring officers to issue tickets for certain offenses instead of making arrests.

“The chaos will continue to escalate unless something changes,” he said in a statement.

But proponents of curbing enforcement of petty offenses say aggressive tactics are unnecessary in an era of historically low crime — and only feed resentment of the police.

Richards, the City Council member, said Lynch’s portrayal of the incidents was a reflection of the lack of diversity in police union leadership. He said the Police Department’s efforts to build trust in neighborhoods alienated by decades of aggressive policing were helping to ease tension. Hostility remains, Richards said, because the Police Department and the union fail to respond vigorously when officers abuse civilians.

“The climate is where it’s at because there is no accountability,” he said.

One former police official said Monahan’s comments ignored the fear among officers of becoming the next Daniel Pantaleo, an officer whose name became synonymous with excessive force after cellphone video captured his attempt to arrest Eric Garner for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island in 2014. The 43-year-old man died, and his final words — “I can’t breathe” — became a rallying cry in the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It’s a Catch-22,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his job. “You have to recognize the difficulty of these jobs, and you can’t be a pendulum saying, ‘Take action. Show restraint.’ ”

Opening fire hydrants is a summer cooling ritual in many of New York’s poor and predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. But it’s also a crime without a business permit or a spray cap installed by the Fire Department. Offenders can be punished by a fine of up to $1,000 and 30 days in jail.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/nyregion/nypd-water-bucket-arrest.html" id="028e5668-d815-3d41-a7ca-cf2d2594f57f">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Cellphone video of New York City police officers ignoring people who brazenly dumped water on them went viral this week, escalating a debate about how much abuse officers should tolerate in an age when they have been ordered to show restraint.

Dousing of Officers Stirs Debate on Police Restraint

Outrage continued to grow Wednesday as the police arrested three men who were seen on video hurling water over the weekend in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The officers had been sent to disperse disorderly groups at fire hydrants during a three-day heat wave and in both incidents left without arresting the assailants.

The police were still seeking at least one other man involved in one of the incidents, in Harlem, where an officer was struck in the head as he was handcuffing a man with an arrest warrant.

Police officers are often accused of using too much force, as the proliferation of cellphone cameras makes it easy for people to share events online. But the recent videos prompted a rare rebuke from the Police Department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer.

His comments followed a department memo reminding officers that while courts give civilians wide leeway to heap verbal abuse on officers, physical acts like dousing or spraying water can result in charges.

Police officials said one of the men arrested Wednesday, Courtney Thompson, 28, of Brooklyn, was seen on video dumping water on an officer in the Brownsville neighborhood Saturday. Two other men, Isaiah Scott, 23, and Chad Bowen, 28, were charged after they were recorded hurling water at officers making an arrest Sunday in Harlem, the police said. All were in custody.

Donovan Richards, the chairman of the City Council committee that oversees the Police Department, said Monahan’s remarks were troubling because they criticized the officers for doing what the department preaches: exercising restraint.

NEW YORK — Cellphone video of New York City police officers ignoring people who dumped water on them went viral this week, escalating a debate about how much abuse officers should tolerate in an age when they have been ordered to show restraint.

On one wall a bulletin board displays a scientific technique that the former commander, Deputy Chief Michael Osgood, introduced for interviewing traumatized victims to help elicit more reliable testimony. Facing it is a second board that holds newspaper clippings touting the major cases solved under his long tenure.

The long shadow of Osgood’s successes is not the only hurdle Harrison faces. She has taken over the unit at a critical time when the Police Department has come under fire for its handling of sex-crime cases, and she has never before overseen a large investigative bureau.

“I like a challenge,” Harrison said as she settled in a chair in her office. “I believe in this work.”

Last year, a city watchdog agency found that severe staff shortages left detectives too overworked to properly investigate cases. Rape reports jumped more than 22 percent last year, an extraordinary spike that victim advocates have said was primarily driven by #MeToo, stretching detectives even thinner.

The Department of Investigation found that police leadership had prioritized rapes committed by strangers over those committed by victims’ acquaintances on the assumption that strangers were more dangerous. It also said that some detectives had been insensitive, dismissive and incredulous toward victims.

The report echoed the accounts of some victims, who have said the police failed to investigate their cases. The auditors laid the blame on the department’s top brass for not heeding requests for more resources from Osgood and the recommendations of a 2010 working group.

The police rejected the most critical findings in the report but implemented some of its recommendations.

Police Commissioner James O’Neill removed Osgood in November and put Harrison in his place. Until his removal, Osgood had enjoyed the support of the city’s main victim-advocate groups, who said at the time they suspected he was being pushed out because he had helped the DOI with its negative report.

Harrison is the first black officer to lead the Special Victims Division, but that powerful precedent has been tempered in police circles by worries that her lack of experience with investigations could hamper her. A police officer for more than 21 years, she has never worked as a detective or run an investigative division.

“She’s behind the eight ball, and she has very big hurdles to go over,” said one veteran police commander who did not want to be named critiquing the commissioner. “She’ll be at the mercy of the detectives below her. Most of them will not be honest with her.”

Still, Harrison, who worked for four years as the commanding officer of two precincts in Queens, the 112th and then the 109th, said her selection was about more than identity politics.

She said her approach would be informed by all of the times as a precinct commander that she had responded to sexual assaults and handled chaotic crime scenes, while simultaneously directing arrests and caring for victims.

“I didn’t get the position because I’m black or female,” she said. “I think that my reputation precedes me. And I know that. I’m a hard worker, I’m a quick learner.”

As a supervisor, Harrison earned a reputation as an accessible leader with a sense of mission. Community leaders said she was skilled at working with residents to solve local problems and always stressed to them that she worked for the public.

“She meant that,” said Alfredo Centola, president of the Whitestone Civic Association, which regularly met with Harrison when she was the commander of the 109th Precinct. “You saw it. You felt it. You knew it.”

Maureen Curtis, who oversees criminal justice and court programs for Safe Horizon, a nonprofit serving crime victims, said Harrison’s lack of experience in investigations might not hinder her. Other police leaders have had success without experience in the areas they worked, she noted.

“The best leadership in NYPD were those that could earn and maintain the respect of the officers they’re supervising, as well as interact in a meaningful way with the communities,” she said. “Those are the ones who will effect change.”

Two weeks ago, the department began quarterly CompStat meetings for Special Victims cases. O’Neill said the effort was aimed at treating sex crimes and child abuse as seriously as murder and robbery.

Still, one of the biggest hurdles facing Harrison is a continuing shortage of staff. The report, which was released before last year’s spike in rape reports, recommended doubling the size of the division’s sex-crimes squads by adding 74 investigators. Only about 55 investigators have been added so far, bringing the total to 129, including many officers who are working provisionally as detectives.

Harrison said she had pressed her superiors for more investigators.

“We need people, and that’s forthcoming,” Harrison said. “I think everybody wants to see Special Victims succeed, and to that end, they’re going to give us what we need to be able to do our jobs effectively.”

Harrison must also navigate without some of the tools Osgood utilized. Top Police Department leaders shut down some of the specialized squads he had set up, including one that was investigating some 8,000 stranger rapes that had gone cold and another that was drilling down on drug-facilitated assaults.

Harrison said those cases were still being investigated, but some former members of the division said it would be impossible for investigators to give those cases the time they needed while also handling regular caseloads and helping new detectives.

Eusebio Santos, a retired detective who worked on the drug-facilitated assaults team until his retirement in December, called the end of that specialized squad disheartening.

“It was important to have a unit like this, to be able to slow things and really give the extra attention that some of these cases deserve,” Santos said, “especially when it’s not clear-cut.”

One help for the new commander has been the department’s investment in upgrading the offices where victims meet detectives. One center under construction in lower Manhattan will allow the police in the borough’s sex-crimes squad to work in the same space as nurses trained to treat sexual assault victims, prosecutors, victim advocates and service providers. It is slated to open this year and is modeled after a successful facility in Philadelphia.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Harrison, however, is reversing a perception among some victims and advocate groups that the division’s investigators, despite the heightened awareness about sexual assault since the #MeToo movement, still have outmoded ideas about rape that discourage victims from moving forward with their cases.

A number of rape victims have complained that investigators treated them with unnecessary skepticism and that their cases languished for months, especially when the accused knows the victim.

Two women, Alison Turkos and Jennifer Welch Demski, charged in court papers that the Police Department had failed to take rape seriously because its masculine culture was biased against women, who made up the majority of sexual assault victims. The Police Department, the women said in the filing, showed “a fundamental disregard for both how sex crimes occur and the debilitating, life-altering harm they cause.”

Turkos, for instance, reported she had been kidnapped and raped by a Lyft driver in October 2017. In an interview, she said that her case had sat for seven months in the hands of a troubled detective who once interrupted an interview about the attack to check a cellphone notification from an app reminding her to drink water. The FBI is investigating the attack because Turkos was taken across state lines, but it has not been solved.

“When someone or something or an institution or a system continuously lets you down, or fails you, it’s hard for me to have faith,” she said.

Since assuming command, Harrison has said her goal is to restore rape victims’ faith in the police and to make the division a place where victims and their trauma are at the center of every decision, from the color of the wall paint to staffing decisions. For her, the measure of success will be when victims feel that coming forward to the police is not a mistake, regardless of whether there is an arrest.

“I want them to feel under my watch, ‘Come forward, we’re not going to re-victimize you,'” she said. “We’re going to respect you, and we’re going to try to help you regain the pieces of your life.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/nyregion/judith-harrison-nypd-svu.html" id="15c1be49-52e1-341e-ac86-4800e49de59c">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The path to Deputy Chief Judith Harrison’s office at the Special Victims Division in lower Manhattan is lined with the reminders of her recently ousted predecessor.

New York's Understaffed Special Victims Unit Gets a New Boss

That decision led to wild confrontation on a bustling avenue in the borough’s court district during which a police officer, who was nearly crushed, shot the driver of the stolen car, police said.

The sequence of events began when police license-plate readers detected a car in the area that had been reported stolen. A 24-year-old officer, whom police did not identify, spotted the car and approached it when she saw three people climb inside, Terence A. Monahan, the chief of department, told reporters at the scene.

But upon seeing the officer, the driver slammed into reverse, pinning the officer against a parked car across from the entrance to the Bronx County Family Court building. She fired three rounds into the back windshield, striking the driver in the chest and left torso, Monahan said.

The officer was being treated for injuries to her hip and leg at an area hospital, police said. The driver underwent surgery for her wounds at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center, where she was in critical condition, according to police. Two passengers in the stolen car were arrested.

Police did not release their names and charges against them, and an official at the scene said they appeared to be teenagers.

Monahan said the wounded driver, the two passengers and a fourth man who remained at large were involved in a robbery and carjacking spree that began early Sunday in the Bronx and traversed lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The foursome — two young women and two young men — stole two cars and robbed three people of purses and cellphones, he said.

They had ditched the first car after crashing it in Brooklyn on Sunday and then stole a charcoal-colored Hyundai Sonata, whose owner had reported it missing that same day, Monahan said.

It was the Sonata that three of the youths rode Monday morning to Sheridan Avenue and 162nd Street, where one had to answer a charge in Bronx Criminal Court, police said.

What they did not know is that police license-plate readers had tracked the car to the spot where it was parked, Monahan said. After the court appearance, the three returned to the car and were about to drive away when the officer and her partner approached, the chief said.

The wild scene unfolded along Sheridan Avenue around 11:30 a.m., as dozens of people were going in and out of the area courts, restaurants and law offices.

Nathaliz Martínez, a legal secretary at the Goodfriend Document Center across from the family court entrance, said she heard the gunshots from the second-floor office and tried to convince herself it was just a car backfiring.

“It wasn’t even afternoon yet,” she said incredulously. “Are you serious?”

A man who did not want to be identified because he was on parole said he was coming out of the Social Security office a block away when he saw the officer spin around before hearing three shots. Within minutes, police helicopters were hovering overhead and police officers swarmed the area.

Another man, Jason Rogers, 32, said he was coming out of the Bronx Criminal Court next door on East 161st Street when he heard the shots, ducked and peered around.

“I was trying to look for the shooter,” Rogers said. “It was a rush.”

Jose Sánchez, 30, had just passed through the scanners in the Family Court when he heard a female officer yelling, “Sir, this is not an exit!” Moments later, he heard gunshots.

“It was loud enough that everybody scattered,” he said. “There were kids outside and the officers brought them inside.”

Dozens of police and court officers cordoned off streets near the scene. High-ranking police officials — the first deputy commissioner, the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and the chief of patrol — huddled with investigators surrounding the stolen sedan. A Nike bag sat on the ground nearby and nine evidence markers surrounded the car.

NEW YORK — Three people on a carjacking spree drove a stolen car to a Bronx courthouse Monday so that one of them could make an appearance in court in regards to a different crime, police said.

Ashley Southall

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