Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Rochester, NY on Tuesday night to protest the news that a grand jury had decided not to charge seven officers involved in the arrest of Daniel Prude in March 2020, whose deaths made headlines after the video showed that he was handcuffed naked. and sat on the street while his head was covered with a spittoon.
Protesters gathered around 7:30 p.m. in the area where Prude, a 41-year-old black man, was confronted and handcuffed by police, just a shy of a year earlier, the Democrat & Chronicle reported. During the night, protesters chanted and teased. police orders to avoid the area of Child and Maple streets, where a police station is located.
Photos posted on social media show that protesters – some wearing helmets and umbrellas – climbed the barriers erected along Child Street and were greeted by officers.
As the protest continued, police in a second tweet of the evening announced that RPD “supports the rights of our citizens to protest peacefully as the US Constitution allows.”
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The tweet added: “We ask that anyone who wants to protest peacefully refrain from participating in or engaging in any act of violence or committing violence.”
Protesters reportedly walked forward and walked against the traffic along Interstate 490 and took to the Rochester Public Safety Building, where protesters gathered regularly – sometimes in scarce clothing to mimic the circumstances of Prude’s arrest – during the summer months until the fall.
Protesters began jumping over metal barriers erected in front of the building, helping each other to climb as they moved toward the front doors.
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The unrest took place around 23:45, according to the report. The protesters were largely non-violent and according to the Democrat & Chronicle, police made no arrests during the night.
Earlier Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced the news that a grand jury would not arrest the six officers and one sergeant handling the case.
Prude died a few days after his meeting with officers, and police apparently described his death as an overdose of drugs. But the police camera video that came to light in September showed that Prude appears to be suffering from a mental episode, possibly caused by drugs.
The footage further shows Prude sitting naked and sitting in the street with a gauze cover, known as a spittoon, over his head. In the course of the interaction, one officer can be seen pushing his knee to Prude’s back while another pushes his face to the sidewalk. They allegedly held him for about two minutes, but they later realized he did not have a pulse and started CPR.
He passed away on March 30th. A medical examiner concluded that the death of Daniel Prude was a murder caused by ‘complications of asphyxia in the situation of physical control’. The report provides a list of agitated delirium and acute intoxication by phencyclidine, or PCP, as contributing factors.
James, whose office took over the investigation, said her office had presented “the strongest case possible” to the grand jury, but could not convince the officers that they had committed a crime.
“I know the Prude family, the Rochester community and communities across the country will rightly be disappointed by this outcome,” said James, who traveled to Rochester to announce the decision of the grand jury in a church near where Prude was fatally injured.
She said she should definitely respect the decision of the grand jury, but also condemned a system that she said was “frustrated by attempts to hold law enforcement officials accountable for the unjustified killing of African Americans”.
“What binds these matters together is a tragic loss of life in circumstances in which death could have been avoided,” said James, who, like the mayor of Rochester and the current and former police chiefs in the city, Black.
New York Attorney General Letitia James addresses the media at Aenon Missionary Baptist Church in Rochester, NY, on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (AP Photo / Adrian Kraus)
“One recognizes the influences of race, from the slave codes to Jim Crow, to lynching, to the war on crime, to the excessive possession of coloreds: Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. And now Daniel Prude, she said.
Lawyers for the seven police officers suspended due to Prude’s death said officers closely followed their training that evening and used a control technique known as ‘segmentation’. They claim that Prude’s use of PCP, which caused irrational behavior, was ‘the main cause’ of his death.
Officers Troy Taladay, Paul Ricotta, Francisco Santiago, Andrew Specksgoor, Josiah Harris and Mark Vaughn, along with sergeants. Michael Magri, was suspended after Prude’s death became public. Officers will remain on leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation, Rochester police chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan told The Associated Press.
FILE – In this September 3, 2020 photo file, Joe Prude, brother of Daniel Prude, on the right, and his son Armin, with a photo of Daniel Prude in Rochester, NY (AP Photo / Ted Shaffre, File)
(AP)
“The system has let Daniel Prude down again,” Elliot Shields, a family lawyer, said of the grand jury’s decision. “It let him down on March 22 when he was released from the hospital. It let him down on the night of March 23 when the police used lethal force against him. And that got him back in the hospital today. let down.”
Shields said Prude’s brother, Joe Prude, was “sad.”
Prude was from Chicago and traveled to Rochester on March 22 to visit his brother. According to a previously released report by the internal affairs investigator, Prude was kicked off the train before arriving in Rochester due to ‘his rebellious behavior’.
Hours later, he was taken to the hospital before going to his brother’s house. Around 3 a.m. on March 23, he ran out his brother’s back door.
Prude was handcuffed by police at about 3:20 a.m. after his brother called police to take him back to the hospital, where he was hours earlier.
“Daniel acted very strangely again around 3am – he ran out my back door, only with a canopy and a pair of long dresses,” Joe Prude wrote in a supportive post later released in documents. “I called the police again so they could find him and take him back to the hospital.”
DANIEL PRUDE VIDEO INCLUDED INCLUDED BY ROCHESTER POLICE, DOCUMENTS SHOW
Police tracked down Daniel Prude shortly after he allegedly went to a phone shop, where police believe he “threw a fire block through the shop window before being spotted by a tow truck driver. ‘According to police, the tow truck driver described Prude as naked, full of blood and said he told the driver that he had the new coronavirus.
What happened next – the video that brought shock waves through New York City and the country – also sparked unrest between former Rochester police chief La’Ron Singletary and Mayor Lovely Warren.
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Singletary, who was fired in connection with the department’s response to the death of Daniel Prude, said in December that Warren had urged him to lie about her handling of the investigation – and claimed he was upset when he refused to do so. do.
In the same month, the city’s public integrity office issued a report concluding that no ethical decay was found in the way Warren or senior staff responded to Prude’s death.
Rochester also came under fire recently after a video spread of how local officials sprayed a 9-year-old girl with pepper spray.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.