NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Guyanese-born attorney, Rovin Rozario, feels that police abuse and brutality in New York City’s urban neighborhoods is quite a common occurrence. After all, he’s seen clients who are alleged victims; and while they may not have suffered the same fate as Jamaica, Queens groom, Sean Bell, they nonetheless have suffered.
Rozario is currently suing the NYPD and the City of New York for $3 million for a beating he said was heaped on his then teenaged Guyanese client, Kevin Gardner on December 3, 2004 in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.
“We’ve brought a lawsuit against the police and the city for wrongful arrest and the violation of my client’s civil rights,” Rozario told HBN this week.
He claimed a group of about 15 NYPD officers kicked down Gardner’s door and roughly tackled him in his bathroom, causing “severe injuries” to his right shoulder. Gardner was allegedly handcuffed for 30 minutes in his apartment and then released without any explanation or charges filed against him.
“The police never apologized or gave any explanation despite several phone calls from the victim’s mother,” the attorney said, while adding that his client still suffers from permanent injuries to his shoulder and the emotional distress of the incident.
Gardner, now 21, has no prior arrest record and was told by the Police they were in “hot pursuit” of a robbery suspect at the time when the alleged abuse occurred, said the lawyer.
As the fallout from the Queens killing of Bell continues to mount, with several hundred protesters marching on One Police Plaza in Manhattan Wednesday evening to picket the NYPD headquarters, Rozario is just one of many advocates who claim police brutality and profiling in the Big Apple is endemic.
Barbadian-born Rien Murray of the Audrey Lorde Project, which advocates against police brutality and for gay and lesbian rights, is especially concerned about the force it says is used to stop racial profiling of minorities and the abuse of gays and lesbians in the West Village.
“Whether in the Bronx, Queens or the West Village, the NYPD beat and/or murder people of color in this city every day,” Murray told HBN. “What is important to acknowledge is that if 400 plus people did not demonstrate in front of the hospital in Queens, Sean Bell’s murder like countless others would never have made it into the press.”
Chuck Mohan of the Guyanese American Workers United, agrees, saying this week there is a need for a total over haul of the New York Police Department. GAWU also called on Mayor Mike Bloomberg to consult with community leaders before implementing new rules and regulations for the NYPD, including but not limited to, intense psychological testing for recruits, ensuring that all police officers live in the five boroughs of the city, the intensification of sensitivity training and that police be assigned to work in communities where they reside. Meanwhile, sources tell HBN that New York State Senator, John Sampson, president of Medgard Evers College and the head of the Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy, is set to meet with the commanding officers of six precincts, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Mike Bloomberg next week to discuss concerns over police brutality.
CGID’s Rickford Burke recently urged politicians, law enforcement officials and community leaders to collaboratively take action to reverse this trend. "We believe that the state legislature should review the current laws and enact harsher, mandatory sentences for illegal gun possession, use, trafficking, sale and other related convictions, as part of a new regime of legislative and social policy measures that are urgently needed to pull our communities out of this abyss of drug offences, gang violence, robberies and shootings," Burke stated recently. "We have also got to make the penalties for gun crimes, including unlawful possession and illegal sale, so harsh and arduous, that it will be a permanent deterrent to perpetrators of this type of crime. This would be an effective expression of society's intolerance of this unacceptable and deviant conduct.
