Newly unveiled text messages show NYPD officers responding to a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Mott Haven encouraged one another to “HAVE FUN” and “Kick their a–” before police beat, pepper-sprayed and arrested hundreds of people, according to copies of the messages made public in connection with a pending lawsuit.
While most of the messages are mundane communications about logistics or safety concerns, some suggest that members of a controversial protest response unit were eager to make arrests and use force at the June 4, 2020 demonstration. In one text sent the day before the encounter, then-Capt. Julio Delgado instructed officers: “We are looking for arrests” and also asked “can we plz play too?” In a message sent during the protest, Detective Jessica Lopez told Delgado to “Kick their a— tonight Capt!!”
Just moments later, officers began to shove protesters with their bikes, hit them with batons, douse them with pepper spray and arrest them, according to lawsuits and witnesses.
“It is clear that their plan was to brutalize the protesters,” said Remy Green, an attorney representing many of the Mott Haven protesters, who convinced a federal judge to order the city to release the text messages.
The NYPD and the city’s law department declined to comment on pending litigation.
The text messages surfaced after a federal judge made them public in response to a lawsuit brought by Shellyne Rodriguez, an artist who said officers cursed at her, shoved her face into a gate, punched her in the stomach and cuffed her wrists so tightly that her hands turned blue and she suffered nerve damage. She said she also had an asthma attack while riding in a hot van with people who had been pepper-sprayed after she was arrested.
The city has already agreed to pay more than $20,000 apiece to hundreds of protesters who were arrested at the Bronx protest. The NYPD also faced a lawsuit from the state attorney general and a mountain of civilian complaints for its response to that demonstration and others across the city in the days and months after the killing of George Floyd.
Delgado, Lopez and others on the text chain were assigned to the Strategic Response Group, a unit that responds to protests and other major city events. Advocates have asked the police department to disband the team, because they say it is overly aggressive.
The city has also noted that a “miniscule” portion of the officers who responded to the 2020 protests faced substantiated complaints, while more than 400 officers were injured and 250 were hospitalized. Last year, the NYPD agreed to change its protocols for protests. Both then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and then-Police Commissioner Dermot Shea defended officers’ response to the Mott Haven protest at the time.
Delgado, who is no longer with the department, could not be reached for comment Tuesday. Records show he faced 11 civilian complaints during his time with the department — one of which was substantiated for abusing his authority by improperly seizing property in 2019, according to records from the city’s police watchdog agency. He has also been named in several lawsuits related to the 2020 protests and one civil suit filed by a former subordinate who said Delgado regularly disparaged him.
The city tried to keep the messages secret, arguing in court papers that they were irrelevant to the case and could subject Delgado to “embarrassment and harassment” or endanger his safety. But Judge Valerie Figueredo ruled last week that they should be released, because the city hadn’t proved Delgado would face serious harm, and because he was a high-ranking officer who was in charge of the Strategic Response Group during the protest.
The detectives’ union did not immediately respond to an inquiry regarding Lopez’s messages. NYPD records show she is a detective in the Strategic Response Group and has not been the subject of any civilian complaints.
Jillian Snider, a retired NYPD officer who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the 2020 demonstrations were especially emotional for police, because those protesting were criticizing their profession.
“People were not happy with us at that moment in time,” she said. “It only takes one extremist in that group of a thousand peaceful people to turn a situation volatile and dangerous. And that’s how we have always been trained.”
No matter what the protest is about, Snider said, police need to have good communication skills and not take protests too personally. She also said officers shouldn’t spend more than two or three years in a unit that constantly dispatches them to protests. And anyone assigned to the Strategic Response Group or another specialized unit should be able to handle themselves in any type of situation, she said.
But Snider said it’s difficult to judge these messages out of context, without knowing the officers’ intentions. She said messages between members encouraging one another to “have a fun safe night,” for instance, reflect typical communications between officers trying to lighten the mood before conducting a serious job.
Green, on the other hand, said these messages suggest that using violence against certain protesters was like a “game” to some police.
“I think it just speaks to a culture of total unaccountability and gleeful violence against people they politically disagree with,” the attorney said.