On its own, the 54-second cellphone video is unremarkable.

Two plainclothes Nassau police officers speak to a man holding a phone and straddling a laid-down bicycle. As the recording opens, the man, who is Black, insists to the officers, who are white, that he knows an assistant district attorney.

“I’m connected,” he says.

The officers, Peter Ellison and Carl Arena, had asked for the man’s last name. He didn’t provide it.

Barely audibly, Ellison says, “I think this is a discon,” short for disorderly conduct, a noncriminal violation.

“You’re under arrest, you won’t tell us your name,” Arena states, producing handcuffs and clasping the man’s left wrist. The man does not resist.

Disorderly conduct complaint filed against Hayes. Credit: U.S. District Court in Central Islip

“We’re trying to be nice to you,” Ellison says, moving the man’s right arm behind his back.

Again, the man offers no resistance. The officers use no force. The Uniondale barber who recorded the arrest from his shop’s rear doorway seems to be the only other person to fix on the encounter between the two officers and Bobby Hayes, a longtime Hempstead resident.

“I didn’t do nothing,” Hayes complains, glancing at the camera, as he’s being handcuffed and led away.

At a time when recordings of white police officers injuring or killing Black citizens have generated sustained protests against systemic racism in law enforcement, viewing the clip of Arena and Ellison arresting Hayes on Jan. 29, 2014, suggests no evidence of misconduct.

But matching the video against the paperwork filed by Arena and Ellison changes the picture.

Arena filed a statement that charged Hayes with disorderly conduct for, he wrote, yelling repeated profanities and racial epithets that drew spectators. Ellison charged Hayes with resisting arrest for, he wrote, physically struggling with the officers and refusing numerous commands to allow himself to be handcuffed.

Arena and Ellison also reported that Hayes had explicitly threatened their lives while on the way to, and at, the police precinct. The man’s lawyer, William Petrillo, said in court that the claim led to Hayes being shackled and held in 23-hour-a-day lockup for more than a week. That was before the video prompted the Nassau District Attorney’s Office to dismiss all charges, including a third accusation of noncriminal marijuana possession.

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Cameras and consequences

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Newsday examined Hayes’ arrest as one of four case histories documenting how civilian video recordings have come into play in evaluating police actions at a time when the Nassau and Suffolk county police departments are among a small minority of large U.S. police forces that do not equip large numbers of officers with body cameras.

In three of Newsday’s case histories, including Hayes’, security or cellphone video captured evidence that contradicted police accounts, prompted judges and prosecutors to dismiss arrests and supported lawsuits that saddled taxpayers with paying more than $4.6 million in compensation so far.

Criminal justice experts concluded after reviewing the three cases for Newsday that the presence of body-worn cameras may have prevented officers from lodging charges that proved baseless. In a statement emailed through Petrillo, Hayes wrote that he believes a body camera would have prevented his arrest.

Resisting arrest complaint filed against Hayes. Credit: U.S. District Court in Central Islip

“Had the officers been wearing one, I never would’ve been framed for something I didn’t do, treated like garbage, thrown into jail for nine days,” Hayes said. “None of this would’ve happened because the police would’ve known the camera showed everything, just like the video that they were unaware of does.”

The fourth case history demonstrated the limitations of interpreting police actions based on civilian videos, which can be taken at any distance or angle and generally do not include sound. Still, the recording captured the events that led the Nassau County Police Department to issue a wanted alarm based on false information. The events convinced a retired Suffolk lieutenant at the center of the case to call for body cameras as standard police equipment.

County leaders appear to be coming around to the idea. Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone in early March called for equipping large numbers of officers with cameras after one of the few devices worn on the force captured officers kicking a handcuffed alleged car thief. Two officers were suspended; three were placed on modified duty. Bellone has since included body cameras in the county’s police reform plan.

In a police reform plan approved by lawmakers Monday, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran also endorsed widespread body camera use for the first time.

‘A perfect teaching tool’

Fred Klein, a former chief prosecutor in the Nassau District Attorney’s Office, teaches at Hofstra Law School and has used the conflicts between the recording of Hayes’ arrest and the police accounts in seminars for aspiring prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys.

He called contradictions between a video that shows cops arresting a quiet, compliant man and written descriptions of the man resisting arrest and yelling abusive and obscene language “just a perfect teaching tool as far as police credibility is concerned.”

“I find it very difficult to imagine an innocent explanation for the discrepancy between the video and the police paperwork,” he said in a Newsday interview.

Photo credit: Paul LaRocco

Klein prosecuted some of Long Island’s most notorious criminals of the 1990s, including serial killer Joel Rifkin and Amy Fisher, the teenager who shot her older lover’s wife. He noted that cops can be held criminally liable for making false official statements. The complaints filed by Arena and Ellison contain a standard disclaimer: “Any false statement made herein is punishable as a Class A misdemeanor.”

“It’s almost unjustifiable that there wasn’t probable cause to bring some charges here against the police,” Klein concluded of the officers, who were not subject to action by the Nassau District Attorney’s Office.

After the arrest, one of the officers told a prosecutor that Hayes had committed the alleged crimes before the recording began. Klein said, however, that specific indicators in the video all but ruled out that account.

“I don’t see how the police paperwork can be truthful given what’s shown on the video,” Klein said.

Had the officers been wearing body cameras, KIein said, the story that Hayes acted disorderly or resisted arrest earlier in the encounter would likely have been debunked.

“Since I believe the cellphone video itself establishes no criminality by Mr. Hayes earlier in the encounter, if the police had been wearing body cams, Mr. Hayes’ arrest would never have occurred, since their own equipment would not have shown any crime,” Klein said.

‘I got it on tape, too!’

When they arrested Hayes, Arena and Ellison were members of the Nassau Police Department’s Bureau of Special Operations, which includes the department’s SWAT team but also conducts plainclothes details targeting drugs, prostitution and other street crimes.

The officers were stopped at a red light in an unmarked car when they noticed Hayes standing in the barbershop’s back parking lot. They reported that they thought they saw him engage in a drug purchase by, they believed, giving money to a woman and putting a small object in his pocket. They also reported that the woman walked through the barber shop and left the scene as they pulled into the lot, got out of the car and approached Hayes.

Barbershop operator James Johnson recorded the video from the rear door of the business. He can be heard advising Hayes not to say anything, telling the cops Hayes hadn’t done anything to warrant arrest and asking, “They could lock you up for not giving a last name?” The officers never look in the direction of the camera.

To support the disorderly conduct charge, Arena wrote that Hayes’ outbursts included, “Go [expletive] yourself, you [expletive] white cracker cops,” and “I ain’t giving you [expletive] you can arrest my [N-word] ass.”

The video captured no such language.

Arena also alleged that Hayes’ yelling drew spectators in what records show were subfreezing temperatures, on snow-and-ice-covered blacktop.

“The crowd that gathered were a mix of elderly people and small children,” Arena stated. “The Officer’s (sic) asked the Defendant to stop his violent behavior numerous times. The Defendant refused to comply.”

A single person passes in the background of the video, appearing unaware of what’s going on as Arena and Ellison walk Hayes away.

In a complaint supporting a resisting arrest charge, Ellison described Hayes’ action and the scene in the same way and then added:

“The Officers attempted to place the defendant into custody. The Defendant started to swing his arms and upper body and pull his arms away from the Officers and refuse to place his hands behind his back. This action by the Defendant did attempt to prevent the Officers from effecting an authorized arrest of himself. The Officers told the Defendant numerous times to stop resisting arrest but the Defendant refused your Deponents commands. Finally the Officers were able to place the Defendant into custody.”

As captured in the video, Hayes follows the officers’ instructions without spoken or physical challenge.

Describing Hayes’ alleged threats after he was in custody, an assistant district attorney quoted him as telling Arena and Ellison, “I hate all white cops, I will Google your names and find out where you live,” and “I got guns and I’ll hunt you down and kill you [expletive].”

The alleged threats prompted the DA’s office to ask a judge to hold Hayes on $50,000 bail, even though he had been charged only with two noncriminal violations and one misdemeanor. The prosecutor also cited Hayes’ past criminal record, which included a then-12-year-old felony weapons possession conviction that had led to prison time. Records show no subsequent convictions.

The judge imposed $20,000 bail, still an amount more typically required after a felony arrest and more than Hayes could afford to post.

“What? I got a job; I didn’t even do anything,” Hayes told the judge, according to the transcript of his arraignment. “This is [expletive] crazy, man. I got it on tape, too.”

The court clerk set his next court appearance.

“Go get the tape,” Hayes said, before he was ushered back to jail.

No charges against officers

Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-Garden City), who was Nassau district attorney when Hayes was arrested, declined to comment about whether the DA’s office had considered filing charges against Arena and Ellison based on the contradictions between the video and their written complaints. A Rice spokesperson referred questions to the current district attorney, Madeline Singas.

Miriam Sholder, a Singas spokeswoman, confirmed in a statement that the office “did not pursue criminal cases against” Arena and Ellison “and absent exceptional circumstances, does not comment on investigations that are closed without charges.”

In 2015, Hayes sued the county, Nassau police and Arena and Ellison in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, alleging violations of his federal civil rights including false arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. In November 2020, the Nassau County Legislature unanimously approved paying Hayes $125,000 to settle the claims.

Hayes, who was 34 at the time of the arrest, has worked as a plumber and promoted his own line of clothing — U Better Behave — on social media. Facebook posts show that he participated in some of the local protests after the police killing of George Floyd last May in Minneapolis.

Hayes declined to be interviewed for this story, beyond his statement endorsing body cameras. Brett Klein, his lawyer in the suit against Nassau (who is not related to Hofstra’s Fred Klein), did not return requests for comment.

Petrillo, who served as Hayes’ criminal defense attorney following the 2014 arrest and brought the video to prosecutors’ attention, said in a written statement: “What Bobby would like to see is that everyone recognizes that God has no favorites. He created us all equally in His image and wants us to come together with love, united as one.”

On the day that Nassau prosecutors moved to dismiss the charges against Hayes, Petrillo had called them “false, fabricated, made up. None of it is real. It is all fantasy.”

Outcome of internal investigations unknown

A year and a half after they arrested Hayes, Arena and Ellison were among three plainclothes officers who pursued a man suspected of soliciting a sex worker outside an East Meadow motel. The man, Justin Daley, fled and crashed his car into another vehicle, killing its driver.

Daley pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Then-acting state Supreme Court Justice Patricia Harrington sentenced him to eight months in jail and probation, far less than the maximum of five to 15 years in prison. She wrote that the police officers had failed to activate the emergency lights on their unmarked vehicle when they first began following Daley.

Daley, a U.S. Marine combat veteran, and his attorney said he believed that he was fleeing an ambush robbery because the officers didn’t identify themselves.

“The judge by her sentence has clearly taken into account … the unfortunate fact that members of the Nassau County Police Department failed to follow police pursuit protocols,” Daley’s attorney, Brian Griffin, said after his client pleaded guilty in 2016.

To that point, Arena and Ellison had been the subject of a combined 29 civilian complaints and internal affairs investigations dating back to 2004, according to a document filed by Nassau County in Hayes’ lawsuit claiming confidentiality regarding details of the allegations.

Newsday last summer requested access to the officers’ records, along with the records of others involved in unrelated cases, under the state Freedom of Information Law. Despite the June 2020 repeal of 50-a, the New York State law that shielded police officer discipline, the Nassau Police Department turned over only heavily blacked out versions of those disciplinary histories.

After Commissioner Patrick Ryder denied an appeal for fuller disclosure, Newsday filed suit, alleging that the department had invoked “new and baseless reasons to refuse disclosure of virtually all substantive information regarding the investigation and discipline of Nassau County police officers.”

The court papers stated: “Newsday wants to inform and educate the public about the processes and standards of police discipline so that the public can judge whether law enforcement agencies operate in the best interest of police officers and the general public.”

The police department has not yet filed a response in the court action.

The four-page “Concise Officer History” report for Arena and 12-page report for Ellison are each almost completely blacked out. The only discernible facts are that Arena and Ellison in 2007 were each subject of founded complaints of unprofessional conduct and that Ellison was found to have broken unspecified departmental rules in 2009. None of those entries revealed discipline, and none appears to correspond to Hayes’ 2014 arrest.

Under a law that requires district attorneys to give defendants evidence that could potentially undercut the prosecution, the Nassau DA’s office has cited the Hayes case in letters to lawyers representing clients who faced trials at which Arena and Ellison were potential witnesses.

Prosecutors wrote that each officer “previously was involved in a case in which he arrested an individual for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. There is a videotape of that arrest that does not show the individual resisting arrest.”

County payroll records show that Ellison, now a detective, earned about $198,000 in total pay in 2019. In December 2016, he was honored at the Nassau County Legislature as the Police Benevolent Association’s monthly “Top Cop” for leading the department’s “Toys for Tots” operation.

Arena, after roughly 30 years of service, left the department in November 2015, earning $209,217 in total pay that final year, the county records show. He was also paid $299,000 in accrued time during the 2016 payroll year, records show, and has a state pension of $149,476, according to SeeThroughNY, an Albany watchdog that promotes transparency in government spending.

An officer’s explanation

Neither Arena nor Ellison have publicly spoken about the arrest. John Wighaus, president of the Nassau Detectives Association, which now represents Ellison, declined to comment. Det. Lt. Richard LeBrun, a police department spokesman, declined requests for comment on behalf of Ellison or Ryder.

Arena provided his account to a prosecutor in February 2014, days after the video had surfaced and Hayes had been released from jail. Speaking to then-Deputy Bureau Chief Brendan Ahern, Arena said that the allegations in his and Ellison’s sworn statements occurred roughly 60 to 90 seconds before the video begins, according to a memo filed by Ahern and obtained by Newsday in a public records request.

In his telling, Ahern wrote, Arena said that “upon noticing the officers, Hayes immediately began cursing loudly at them with a range of expletives and comments about police officers.”

Arena said that when he asked Hayes to explain what they had just witnessed from their unmarked car, Hayes responded, “nothing happened.” When asked about the woman whom the officers said they saw exchange something with Hayes, he replied, “What girl?” and when asked his name, said “Go [expletive] yourself, you [expletive] white cracker cops.”

Arena told Ahern that he repeatedly tried to interject in the “tirade” to get Hayes’ name or identification, to no avail. He said Johnson — whom he didn’t identify by name — appeared at the back of his barbershop and rejected a call to go back inside, identifying himself as the owner.

During all of this, Arena said that he saw an elderly woman pushing a cart stop to see what was going on, followed by a woman and two small children, and “3-4 young black males.” Ahern’s memo doesn’t explain how long any of these people lingered and why they couldn’t be seen on the recorded portion of the incident.

About 45 seconds to a minute prior to the video starting, Arena recounted that he first told Hayes he was going to be arrested for disorderly conduct — something that appears to be contradicted by Ellison saying on the video, “I think this is a discon.”

Arena said he twice attempted to grab Hayes’ right arm with his left hand, but that Hayes swung it violently, causing Arena to “lose his balance and nearly slip on the ice,” Ahern wrote.

It was then, Arena recounted, he told Ellison “let’s slow down here.” Johnson “reappeared and stated to Hayes that he was going to get a camera.” Hayes told Johnson, “to go get it,” the report states.

Arena stated that he then removed a glass pipe sticking out of Hayes’ pocket, along with a small bag of marijuana. He told Ahern that he did not invoice the pipe because it appeared unused. He “was unsure what happened with the pipe,” but “recalls invoicing the marijuana,” Ahern wrote.

Arena told Ahern that the encounter captured on video started after he recovered those items. In the statement Hayes provided Newsday, he said he believed that the officers were unaware they were being recorded. Neither Arena nor Ellison appear to ever address the camera or look directly at it.

Picking apart officer’s defense

Via video conference, Fred Klein, the law professor and former prosecutor, broke down the recording as he does with his classes by examining whether it was plausible that the disorderly conduct and resisting arrest could have occurred in the 60 to 90 seconds before the video began, as Arena claimed.

Were that the case, Klein said, all of the spectators would have gathered and dispersed almost immediately while the incident continued.

Hayes would also have shifted almost instantly from threatening, profanity-laced shouting at the officers to speaking calmly.

“If he had used all this profanity that they had said, cursing and threatening them, would they have been treating him so courteously when they were arresting him?” Klein asked.

More important to Klein, Arena stands, with a relaxed posture, at more than arm’s length in front of Hayes as he speaks. He is not in a position indicating that he had just attempted to grab Hayes’ right arm with his left hand and had nearly slipped and fallen because Hayes had resisted.

Klein also noted that Hayes’ right hand held his cellphone, which police would have likely taken during a struggle. Additionally, Klein pointed out that the cops allowed Hayes to straddle his bicycle rather than remove it as a potential weapon within the reach of a combative suspect.

“Unless they arrested him, and then un-arrested him, and then the video began — which is preposterous — it couldn’t have occurred the way the police officers say,” Klein said.

Photo credit: Howard Schnapp

In the video, Arena takes out his handcuffs only after Ellison, standing off to Hayes’ right side, states “I think this is a discon.” The comment suggests that the officers had decided at that moment that Hayes’ refusal to provide his name met the threshold of disorderly conduct — even though they said they had already been subject to his verbal tirade and already tried to arrest him, before pulling back.

When Arena states, on video, “You’re under arrest, you won’t tell us your name,” he makes no mention of resisting arrest, the only actual crime Hayes was charged with. Klein said that declining to provide a last name cannot be used as sole justification for an arrest.

Klein concluded that police “grabbed Mr. Hayes with no reasonable suspicion or probable cause. They demanded that he identify himself and explain himself, which the police have no authority to do. He refused to do that. And they decided to arrest him for disorderly conduct for not giving them the ID.”

“That is what’s on the video,” he said. “That’s what seems to me to be the reasonable explanation for what happened here. And then later on, they decided to blow it up and make it a resisting arrest as well.”

On the day in February 2014 that the criminal case against Hayes was dismissed, he stood outside the courtroom with his wife and said he was “just glad the truth came out.”

“I was innocent from the start,” he said.

On Feb. 15, 2019, the Nassau County Police Department issued an alarm for a stolen truck. Distributed nationwide, the alarm said police were looking for a black GMC Sierra pickup truck driven by an armed, dangerous man wanted for assault on a police officer.

Three weeks later, police pulled over the man at gunpoint and seized the truck.

The truck wasn’t stolen.

The man wasn’t armed.

He was not wanted.

He was retired Suffolk police lieutenant William F. Hasper.

My number one fear with this young officer with his gun, with these guns at my head, is that all it would have taken was for him to get nervous, to trip, and I would’ve taken a round or two center mass right in the middle of my cerebellum.

William Hasper

In a Newsday interview, he recalled facing a cop with a gun drawn, surrounded by at least four more officers with their guns drawn:

“My number one fear with this young officer with his gun, with these guns at my head, is that all it would have taken was for him to get nervous, to trip, and I would’ve taken a round or two center mass right in the middle of my cerebellum.”

About two months later, a state trooper pulled Hasper over again in the same truck on the same alarm. The trooper let Hasper go with a warning. Only after the second stop was the alarm canceled.

The story of how the Nassau police department made Hasper the subject of a false stolen vehicle alarm starts with a dispute between two men over a honked horn in a Westbury credit union parking lot — Hasper, who honked the horn, and Nassau Det. Sgt. William S. Russell, who took issue with Hasper’s honking.

A security camera at a 7-Eleven store recorded their actions. Its video captured events that led Nassau police to issue an alarm that sought a man whose address they knew, along with a pickup truck that was his and not stolen. But, taken from a distance, the recording provides only a limited ability to judge Russell’s report that Hasper’s truck struck him six times, Hasper’s denials in a federal lawsuit and the account of a security guard who witnessed the events.

Newsday examined Russell’s interaction with Hasper as one of four case histories documenting how civilian video recordings have come into play in evaluating police actions at a time when Nassau and Suffolk county police departments are among a small minority of large U.S. police forces that do not equip large numbers of officers with body cameras.

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone in early March called for equipping large numbers of officers with cameras after one of the few devices worn on the force captured officers kicking a handcuffed alleged car thief. Two officers were suspended; three were placed on modified duty. Bellone has since included body cameras in the county’s police reform plan.

Main Story

Cameras and consequences

Watch and Read

In a police reform plan approved by lawmakers Monday, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran endorsed widespread body camera use.

In three of Newsday’s case histories, security or cellphone video captured evidence that contradicted police accounts, prompted judges and prosecutors to dismiss arrests and supported lawsuits that saddled taxpayers with paying more than $4.6 million in compensation so far.

Criminal justice experts concluded after reviewing the three cases for Newsday that the presence of body-worn cameras may have prevented officers from lodging charges that proved baseless.

In this, the fourth case history, the single security camera was too far away to offer a precise view of the interactions between Hasper and Russell. Located across a side street, the 7-Eleven camera captured a wide view in which Hasper and Russell are small figures.

A video’s shortcomings

Even after Newsday enlarged the section of the video in which they appear, the quality of the imagery ruled out definitively determining, for example, whether Russell displayed his police shield or whether Hasper became agitated while in his truck. Hasper, for one, says that a body camera’s close-up view and sound recording would have documented whether his version or Russell’s version of who did and said what is more accurate.

Hasper is a West Point graduate and former U.S. Army Airborne Ranger who served as a tactical control officer launching Patriot missiles during the first Gulf War. He joined the Suffolk County Police Department in 1993 and retired in 2012 after a disabling on-duty motor vehicle accident.

Photo credit: Chris Ware

He said his arrest and eventual misdemeanor conviction have converted him from opposing body cameras to supporting them.

“I never was a big fan because I, myself, and everybody I ever worked with were decent, hardworking, honest cops,” he said, adding: “This experience has convinced me that all police officers — all, each, every, inclusive — should have a body camera. Because if this police officer had had a body camera … this incident would have went nowhere.”

On the day of the incident, security guard Cameron Grady signed a handwritten statement prepared for him by Det. Ryan Lunt that purported to be Grady’s first-person description of what he witnessed while in the credit union parking lot. The statement quoted Grady as saying he saw Hasper use his truck to “intentionally bump” into Russell “multiple times until he pushed him out of the way.”

Grady later disavowed the statement in a letter to the judge who oversaw Hasper’s trial. He wrote that Hasper never struck Russell, and later testified that he signed the statement because he had trusted the detective to write the truth.

In his lawsuit, Hasper alleges malicious prosecution, falsification of evidence, unlawful search and seizure and false imprisonment. The county contends that police had probable cause to arrest him and that a judge convicted Hasper of one misdemeanor count while acquitting him of felony assault.

Nassau police spokesman Lt. Det. Richard LeBrun failed to respond to Newsday questions about Hasper’s case submitted by telephone and email. Those sought the department’s official record of the facts, including the identity of the officer who issued the alarm.

Newsday last summer requested access to Russell’s disciplinary records, along with the records of others involved in unrelated cases, under the state Freedom of Information Law. Despite the June 2020 repeal of 50-a, the New York State law that shielded police officer discipline, the Nassau police department turned over heavily blacked-out documents.

In Russell’s case, it provided papers that showed only his name, serial number, hire date and current assignment.

After Commissioner Patrick Ryder denied an appeal for fuller disclosure, Newsday filed suit alleging that the department had invoked “new and baseless reasons to refuse disclosure of virtually all substantive information regarding the investigation and discipline of Nassau County police officers.”

The court papers stated: “Newsday wants to inform and educate the public about the processes and standards of police discipline so that the public can judge whether law enforcement agencies operate in the best interest of police officers and the general public.”

The police department has not yet filed a response in the court action.

Clash in a parking lot

The encounter between Hasper and Russell, who did not return calls seeking an interview, lasted for eight minutes.

It started after Russell pulled halfway into the crowded parking lot of the Bethpage Federal Credit Union on Old Country Road. He was on duty in plain clothes and driving an unmarked car.

While Russell waited for a space, Hasper tried to pull in behind him. Hasper’s pickup blocked a lane of traffic. After about a minute, he honked his horn several times, according to the men’s accounts in police and court records.

Photo credit: Chris Ware

Russell found a parking spot and then stood beside Hasper’s truck for about 16 seconds before Hasper pulled into a parking place. Russell alleged that Hasper “was screaming and waving his hands at me,” hurling expletives and “acting totally irrational.” Russell also stated that he identified himself as an on-duty Nassau sergeant and “called the third precinct to send an available car to assist me with an investigation at this time.”

In Hasper’s telling, Russell used profanity, was visibly enraged and never displayed his police shield. Hasper also recounted keeping his hands on the steering wheel and shift column and calmly asking why Russell hadn’t moved to let him enter the lot. He described Russell as “screaming and spitting,” and quoted Russell as shouting, “Hey, guy, the way it works around here is you [expletive] wait, you [expletive] wait, and when it’s clear, then you [expletive] pull in! Got it?”

Emerging from the truck, Hasper walked toward the credit union, angling away from Russell, the video shows. He asserted that Russell shouted at him, “Hey, tough guy, don’t think you’re just walking away from this. You’ll see who the [expletive] [expletive] is.”

While Hasper was in the credit union, Russell paced outside, talked on his phone and looked onto the road. Hasper emerged from the building, walked past Russell and got into his truck. Russell walked behind the truck. The video captured Hasper backing up, braking, getting out of the truck, walking toward Russell and returning to the truck.

Describing the events, Russell wrote in a police statement that he again showed Hasper his sergeant’s shield and that Hasper screamed into Russell’s cellphone while Russell again called for a patrol car. He also recounted ordering Hasper not to leave, telling Hasper that he was standing behind the truck and said he got hit by the truck when Hasper backed up.

Asserting that he had no idea Russell was a police officer, Hasper said he asked security guard Grady to “watch my back” because he was concerned that Russell was calling friends for a possible physical altercation. He also recounted backing out slowly and stopping because Russell was behind his truck. The truck didn’t make contact with Russell, he stated.

Photo credit: Courtesy Anthony Grandinette

In Grady’s telling, Hasper “never struck” Russell.

“The guy in the suit [Russell] was the one acting all crazy,” he wrote in his letter to the judge. “Hasper was a gentleman and was calm the whole time.”

Hasper backed out of the parking spot. According to Russell, he “backed up, hitting me two more times, knocking me backwards.” The video shows Russell walking from behind the truck and putting his hands on the hood. He stated that he was holding up his sergeant’s shield. Grady rushed toward them. He wrote that Russell held his cellphone, not his badge, and “did not identify himself to Hasper and me as a police officer.”

Hasper pulled forward again. Russell walked backwards in front of the moving truck with his hands still on the hood. He asserted that the truck struck him three times “while backing me up,” causing “pain to my right knee and substantial pain [to] right foot.” Russell stepped to the side of the moving truck. Hasper made a right turn onto Old County Road. Russell ran to his car and pulled out in unsuccessful pursuit.

Grady wrote, “When [Russell] jumped in front of the truck Hasper was careful as he was trying to leave [the] parking lot. Nobody knew this guy was a police officer. He seemed to me to be an aggressive guy looking for [a] fight.”

Stolen vehicle alarm

Detectives identified Hasper from the truck’s license plate. They went to Hasper’s home, found he was not there and spoke with him by telephone. Hasper reported that Russell had never identified himself as a cop and that, as a former cop, he had tried to de-escalate the confrontation, according to his lawsuit.

Around 7:25 p.m., a detective informed Hasper that police intended to arrest him that night, the lawsuit states.

At 7:36 p.m., Nassau police issued the alarm.

Indicating that Nassau police were searching for a stolen truck, the alarm listed the “date of theft” as Feb. 15, 2019. The alert also stated: “Vehicle used in the commission of a crime; occupant(s) armed and/or dangerous; preserve for prints.” It described the occupant as a “retired MOS [member of service]” who was “wanted for assault on po [police officer].”

At Newsday’s request, John Jay College Criminal Justice professor of police practice Joseph Pollini reviewed the Nassau police department’s actions. Before retiring, Pollini was a 33-year veteran of the New York Police Department who commanded a major case squad, robbery squad and a cold case homicide squad.

Based on the portion of the alert that told cops they were searching for a stolen truck, Pollini concluded that the bulletin contained false information.

Photo credit: Joseph Pollini

“How could you steal your own truck?” he asked. “To indicate that he’s armed and dangerous is totally ridiculous and absurd.”

About three hours after the department issued the alarm, two detectives and a uniformed officer went to Hasper’s home. Hasper’s partner, Lia Todoran, contacted him. He spoke with the detectives by telephone and connected them with a lawyer who put the detectives on notice that they would need a warrant to enter his home. The following day, attorney William Petrillo arranged Hasper’s surrender.

Held in jail overnight, Hasper was charged with traffic violations, leaving the scene of an accident and second-degree assault for allegedly striking Russell with the truck. A judge released Hasper on $5,000 bail.

A detective asked Petrillo’s law partner, Edward Sapone, to turn over Hasper’s truck. Sapone told the detective to get a warrant, the lawsuit says. Police never sought a warrant, according to Brendan Brosh, a spokesman for the Nassau District Attorney’s Office. Such a warrant would have enabled police to comb the truck for evidence.

Although Hasper had gone through arrest and arraignment, was represented by a lawyer and had given up his registered guns, Nassau police allowed the stolen truck alarm to remain in force.

Fred Klein, a Hofstra law professor and former chief of the Nassau DA’s Major Offense Bureau, said police should have vacated the alarm.

“Once he surrenders himself, they know it’s not stolen,” he said. “They can’t keep an alarm out like that.”

Detained at gunpoint

Three weeks after the alarm was issued, Suffolk police spotted Hasper’s truck as he was driving in Deer Park and pulled him over at gunpoint.

“The next thing I know, I look to my left, and I see a young police officer about 10 feet away with his gun out pointed right to my head, and I couldn’t believe it,” Hasper recalled.

Police ordered Hasper to the ground and placed him in handcuffs, the lawsuit says. One police officer shouted, “Who reported this vehicle stolen?” the lawsuit says.

Suffolk police confirmed that the truck was not stolen. Still, Nassau cops told them to detain Hasper, according to the lawsuit.

“While I’m in the back of the police car, I’m thinking to myself, ‘If this could happen to me, it could happen to anybody,'” he said.

A Nassau police officer arrived on the scene and drove away the truck.

Klein said Nassau police should have gotten a warrant if they wanted the truck. “You can’t use an alarm as a substitute for a warrant,” he said.

Ten days later, a Nassau County assistant district attorney released the truck to Hasper. Even so, police kept the alarm in effect. The state trooper pulled him over the second time, in May 2019, as Hasper was driving a friend and a friend’s wife home from chemotherapy for 9/11-related cancer.

“This is one of the most traumatic, enduring things I’ve ever had to face,” Hasper said. “I would put these experiences on par with the stress that you feel, that I particularly felt from being in combat.”

After the second stop, Nassau police canceled the alarm, records show.

Brosh said the DA’s office did not open an investigation of the alarm because it had not received a complaint.

Hasper’s lawyer, Sapone, wrote in an email: “As soon as I learned of the incident, I immediately made a complaint to the assigned assistant district attorney on the case, who assured me they would look into it.”

He did not respond when asked if he filed a complaint with the Nassau Internal Affairs Unit.

Christopher Mango, the then-assistant district attorney handling the case, declined to comment.

After Hasper’s arrest, the district attorney’s office expanded the counts leveled against him to include third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, and second-degree reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor charging that he had recklessly placed Russell in danger of suffering serious physical injury.

At a nonjury trial in 2020, Nassau Supreme Court Justice Christopher Quinn acquitted Hasper of both assault charges, including the one cited in the alarm. Quinn found Hasper guilty of the traffic violations and reckless endangerment. Hasper is appealing the verdict.

Hasper said the criminal trial cost him about $200,000 in legal fees, a price tag he knows few people can afford.

“If you are marginalized, if you are on the fringes of society, if you are a Black man, if you are a Latino man, and you don’t have the means to defend yourself, you just have to go in and take the plea,” he said. “No one’s going to listen to you anyway.”

Ten surveillance cameras and one cellphone recorded predawn events that led Hempstead Village police officers to arrest a landscape worker with enough force to perforate his small intestine — a disabling injury that saddled taxpayers with paying $4.5 million in damages.

From different points of view, the civilian recordings captured images and, at a crucial point, sounds of officers subjecting Abel Alvarenga Vasquez to unjustified force while arresting him for alleged disorderly conduct, according to two law enforcement experts who reviewed the videos and case documents at Newsday’s request.

A third expert said that while he was unsure whether the force was justified, police should have ignored pestering by Alvarenga because it was clear he was drunk.

All three said that the recordings undercut Officer William Falk’s sworn statement that Alvarenga had interfered with efforts to render medical assistance to a friend of Alvarenga who had been injured in a bar fight — a central element of the disorderly conduct charge.

One expert sharply questioned Falk’s failure to bring Alvarenga to an ambulance that arrived on the scene after Falk slammed him against a car.

“He’s in your custody. If he needs medical attention, you’ve got to get it for him,” said Joseph Giacalone, a former New York City Police Department detective sergeant who teaches a course on the use of force at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

No prosecution

After studying recordings, the Nassau District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Falk. An assistant district attorney concluded in a memo that the 6-foot-5, 220-pound Falk had used justified force while arresting the 5-foot-10, 165-pound Alvarenga.

Bennett Capers served for 10 years in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, teaches criminal law at Fordham University Law School and directs Fordham’s Center on Race, Law & Justice. He challenged the DA’s finding that the arrest was lawful.

“They conveniently ignore that there must be probable cause for an arrest. Here, there was none, as evidenced not only by the video, but by the fact that the charges were dropped,” Capers wrote in an email.

Photo credit: Jeffrey Basinger

Ayanna Sorett, a fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Justice and former Manhattan assistant district attorney, agreed that Alvarenga’s actions were not criminal and said the DA’s office should have done a more thorough investigation of the police officers’ actions.

“Just all of the facts and circumstances lead you to believe that they violated the law,” Sorett said. “And to me, that’s assault. And a prosecution could be started minimally for an assault with respect to Alvarenga as the complainant.”

Nassau District Attorney Madeline Singas said through a spokesman: “In this matter, the officer in question is currently being prosecuted by this office and we’re precluded from discussing the facts of a past investigation. The matter was thoroughly investigated, and we defer to the final agency determination from October 2015 for any specifics with regards to this closed investigation.”

Falk, an 11-year veteran of the 119-officer Hempstead force, resigned in September 2019 and collects an annual pension of $84,726. He left the job amid a string of five arrests in which Nassau and Suffolk police charged him with criminal contempt for allegedly violating an order of protection that his wife secured during a contested divorce.

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Cameras and consequences

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Falk declined to speak with Newsday, except to deny that he had taunted the moaning Alvarenga after officers slammed him against a car. In court proceedings, Falk said he did not know that Alvarenga was injured and denied using excessive force. He did concede that he hadn’t administered medical aid to Alvarenga’s friend, Francisco Garcia.

Alvarenga declined to be interviewed through his lawyer.

Newsday reviewed Alvarenga’s arrest, injury and acquittal as one of four case histories documenting how video recordings have come into play in evaluating police actions at a time when Nassau and Suffolk county police departments are among a small minority of large U.S. police forces that do not equip large numbers of officers with body cameras.

In three of Newsday’s case histories, security or cellphone video captured evidence that contradicted police accounts, prompted judges and prosecutors to dismiss arrests and supported lawsuits that saddled taxpayers with paying more than $4.6 million in compensation so far.

Criminal justice experts concluded after reviewing recordings in the three cases for Newsday that the presence of body-worn cameras may have prevented officers from lodging charges that proved baseless.

The fourth case history demonstrated the limitations of interpreting police actions based on civilian videos, which can be taken at any distance or angle and generally do not include sound. Still, the recording captured the events that led the Nassau County Police Department to issue a false stolen vehicle alarm. The events convinced a retired Suffolk lieutenant at the center of the case to call for body cameras as standard police equipment.

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone in early March called for equipping large numbers of officers with cameras after one of the few devices worn on the force captured officers kicking a handcuffed alleged car thief. Two officers were suspended; three were placed on modified duty. Bellone has since included body cameras in the county’s police reform plan.

In a police reform plan approved by lawmakers Monday, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran endorsed widespread body camera use.

Disorderly conduct complaint filed against Alvarenga.

The night’s events

This account of the events that took place after a night of heavy drinking by Alvarenga and a friend is drawn from testimony in legal proceedings and the contents of a Nassau district attorney’s summary of the case, as well as from Newsday’s compilation of recordings.

What the police saw, and most of what they said, are missing because the officers were not equipped with body cams — perhaps shaping their conduct.

“Overall, if there were body cameras, none of this would have happened,” Sorett said. “The police officers wouldn’t have responded in the way they did.”

Following is Newsday’s reconstruction of what happened, along with expert opinions about it:

Shortly before 2 a.m. on March 5, 2015, Alvarenga and his friend Garcia arrive at El Tucanazo, a since-shuttered bar located in a Hempstead strip mall bordered by Front Street and Fulton Avenue. The mall also includes a delicatessen and a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Surveillance cameras operated by the bar, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the delicatessen and a gas station across the street capture the scene from multiple angles in silent videos.

At almost 4 a.m., Alvarenga and Garcia are side by side at the bar. Alvarenga holds the hand of a woman bartender while a fight breaks out between Garcia and another man. Extremely intoxicated, as evidenced by later blood alcohol readings, Alvarenga does not notice the man wrestle Garcia to the floor and punch him at least seven times.

Bouncers drag and push the fighters out the door. Alvarenga appears to fall asleep over the bar. Outside, Garcia stands in a parking lot in front of the club. He is bleeding from the head. Two bouncers stand in the club’s doorway, then go in and come out, at one point bringing Garcia what appears to be paper toweling that he uses to dab his head.

A little less than two minutes later, Alvarenga comes out of the club. Over the next 10 minutes, he talks with the bouncers both outside and inside the bar until a bouncer walks him out.

Working an overnight shift, Falk happens on the scene about two minutes later. He was on his way to a meal break at the strip mall’s deli. The bouncers, Alvarenga and Garcia approach Falk in the parking lot. Garcia appears to have blood on his shirt. Falk provides no first aid.

Officer Adam Wade and a third officer arrive, also on their meal break. Falk, two bouncers, Alvarenga and Garcia gather near the doorway. Garcia and Alvarenga talk with the bouncers for roughly two minutes.

Falk emerges into view from inside the doorway, appears to say something to Alvarenga, spins Alvarenga around and marches him away. After a last shove, Alvarenga ends up about 40 feet from the club door.

Alvarenga approaches and begins recording with his cellphone camera from a distance of about 30 feet away.

The voice of a female officer calls Alvarenga “Amigo.”

He says, “No, nothing,” and continues recording.

“Listen, go,” the officer says, but then she tells Alvarenga, “Tape all you want. Tape all you want.”

Alvarenga continues to record. The officer says, “I told you to go. We’re telling you to go.” She takes no action to enforce the commands.

‘This guy needs to leave’

Alvarenga continues recording. Falk ignores him and talks to the bouncers. A bouncer tells Falk that Garcia must have fallen on the dance floor.

“Yeah, right,” Alvarenga says.

Falk tells a bouncer to inform Garcia that an ambulance is coming for him. The bouncer speaks to Garcia in Spanish. Garcia says that he doesn’t want to go.

“He’s gotta go. He’s got a massive cut on his head,” Falk says.

For about another minute, the bouncers tell Falk they don’t know how Garcia got injured. They ignore Alvarenga.

After a few moments, a male voice says, “[unintelligible] video.”

Falk looks at Alvarenga and says, “This guy needs to leave.”

Alvarenga used his cellphone to take these photos of Falk before his arrest.

A bouncer moves toward Alvarenga, tells him to stop doing what he’s doing and tries to grab his cellphone.

“If he doesn’t leave, he’s going to get arrested,” Falk says.

Alvarenga holds the phone while backing up. The recording stops.

Exterior surveillance cameras pick up the cops and bouncers milling near the bar’s front door. Alvarenga stays at a distance. After about four minutes, Falk chases Alvarenga. Alvarenga runs with his arms up. Falk and Wade move toward him. Alvarenga runs to a spot about 90 feet from the bar front door. Falk and Wade return to the group in front of the bar.

Alvarenga walks in their direction. Still more than 60 feet away, he appears to be using his cellphone to record the scene.

“I got you,” he calls.

“I’m going to arrest you,” an officer says.

“Yeah right, I got you. I got you. I got you, mother [expletive],” Alvarenga says.

Taken into custody

Falk and Wade chase again. Falk catches Alvarenga and slams him against a car. Alvarenga’s torso hits a driver’s side mirror. Wade presses against him. Alvarenga’s phone wedges between the car’s hood and windshield. It continues to record sound.

Alvarenga moans loudly. The impact has perforated his small intestine.

“We got you,” a cop’s voice says.

Alvarenga continues to moan.

“How does that feel, huh?” a cop’s voice asks.

Alvarenga still moans. Police cuff his hands behind his back. Falk walks him to a police car and shuts him in the rear seat. About six minutes later, an ambulance arrives in response to Falk’s call for aid for Garcia.

Falk charged Alvarenga with disorderly conduct, under New York law a noncriminal violation that is less serious than the lowest level misdemeanor and often results in a summons.

To support the accusation, he stated in a sworn complaint that Alvarenga had “interfered” with “numerous” officers and emergency ambulance personnel who were trying to assist Garcia.

He also stated that Alvarenga had become “belligerent and flailed arms at officers” and had “congregated with other persons in a public place and refused to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse.”

Under questioning at Alvarenga’s trial, he conceded that Alvarenga could not have interfered with medical personnel because the ambulance arrived after Alvarenga was handcuffed in the police car. He said that he considered himself medical personnel, while acknowledging that he didn’t render aid to Garcia.

Charge dismissed

After conducting a trial, Judge Ayesha Brantley dismissed the charge against Alvarenga. She noted that no ambulance or medical personnel were present at the time Alvarenga allegedly interfered with their efforts. She also concluded from the video that Alvarenga had not come between the police and Garcia and that he had stayed several feet away from the officers at the scene.

Video that showed Alvarenga retreating from the police was “actually more indicative of an attempt to avoid direct contact with the officers,” Brantley found.

Photo credit: James Escher

“There is nothing to suggest that [Alvarenga’s] actions were menacing or likely to incite his audience,” she wrote.

Giacalone said that Alvarenga’s shouting probably annoyed the police but wasn’t sufficient cause to chase or arrest him.

“Most people are aggravating out there, and you just have to rise above it. Just ignore it,” he said.

Capers said he found the video “tough to watch” and that he saw no evidence justifying Alvarenga’s arrest or the use of force against him.

“If anything, it seems the violent arrest was in response to Alvarenga’s videotaping the police,” he wrote in an email.

Both Sorett and Giacalone focused on the fact that an internal Nassau District Attorney’s Office memo stated that an investigator had “restored” videos recorded by Alvarenga’s phone. His lawyer said the videos had been deleted.

“How did it get deleted in the first place?” Sorett said. “I take that as knowledge on the part of the officers that what they did was wrong.”

Constitutional law experts say that the members of the public generally have a First Amendment right to record police as long as they do not hinder officers. Taunting or commenting on an arrest that takes place in public typically does not justify taking someone into custody.

“What’s clear is that police can’t just demand someone stop recording. There has to be some kind of interference by the person recording,” said Stephen D. Solomon, a New York University professor of First Amendment law. He was not speaking specifically about Alvarenga’s case.

Dangerous injury

The impact of slamming against the car perforated Alvarenga’s small intestine, Dr. Michael S. Drew concluded in a report after examining Alvarenga and reviewing videos as an expert witness for Alvarenga in his civil suit against the police department.

Drew reported that a CT scan showed evidence of chest wall contusion and bowel hemorrhaging consistent with blunt trauma.

Dr. Alexander Axelrad, trauma medical director at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital, said in an interview that perforation of the small intestine is a potentially fatal injury, especially if there is a delay of more than 12 hours before treatment. Axelrad played no role in Alvarenga’s case.

Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, fever, abdominal pain and blood in the stool, he said. Intoxication can complicate a diagnosis.

A little more than six minutes after Falk placed Alvarenga in the police car, he walked Alvarenga to a men’s room in the Dunkin’ Donuts. They were captured on the store’s interior video. About 10 minutes later, police again brought Alvarenga to the bathroom.

Giacalone said Alvarenga appeared to be in pain when police escorted him to the bathroom. Capers said the cellphone recording contradicted Falk’s assertions that Alvarenga did not show any sign of injury.

“From his audible moaning captured on his cellphone, it also strains credulity that the police didn’t know he was in pain. Add to this he complains of bladder pressure and needs to be escorted to the bathroom twice within a span of 10 minutes, the first time spending two minutes inside and the second time spending three minutes inside, it doesn’t make sense that the police didn’t know something was wrong,” he wrote in an email.

Deposed in Alvarenga’s civil lawsuit, Falk denied using excessive force and said Alvarenga’s injuries could have happened elsewhere. He was not asked about Alvarenga’s moaning.

“What I’m saying is that he could’ve sustained that at any time,” Falk said. “He could’ve sustained it in the bar. He could’ve sustained it on the way home. But at the time when he was in my car, he never said he was hurt, and I didn’t see anything.”

Debra Urbano-DiSalvo, who prosecuted the case for Hempstead Village, said in an interview, “Who knows where this guy got hurt?”

Newsday requested an interview with Wade through the Hempstead police department and his police union. Wade did not respond.

An ambulance transported Garcia to Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre. The bar’s surveillance system then captured a cab arriving. Police spoke to the driver. The cab took Alvarenga home.

In his lawsuit, Alvarenga said he begged the cabdriver to take him to a hospital, but the driver refused, saying that police had ordered Alvarenga taken home. John Mullan, one of Alvarenga’s lawyers, said police put him in a cab rather than an ambulance to conceal what had happened.

Reaching home, Alvarenga struggled with unlocking the door for half an hour and then collapsed inside. His wife called an ambulance around 5:40 a.m. At Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, now called NYU Langone Hospital, Alvarenga told doctors that Hempstead police had beaten him, according to hospital records.

The admitting diagnosis on the intake form was assault, and his blood alcohol level was .18, more than twice the legal limit for drunken driving.

Investigation and settlement

Based on Alvarenga’s allegation, the Public Corruption Bureau of the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office, then headed by acting DA Singas, opened an investigation.

According to the corruption bureau’s memo, investigators interviewed Garcia and Alvarenga, reviewed Hempstead police records and studied Alvarenga’s medical file.

The investigators also collected videos, including the two on Alvarenga’s phone that captured the key moments before the officers chased him down. Mullan said those videos had been deleted. The memo states that an investigator “restored” the videos.

Mullan said Alvarenga did not delete the videos and that Alvarenga saw Falk handling his phone immediately after his arrest.

Recommending against filing charges against the police, the memo stated:

“Mr. Alvarenga’s injury was caused as a result of him running from officers in an effort to evade apprehension once he was informed that he was being placed under arrest.”

Mr. Alvarenga’s injury seems to be the unintentional result of his own doing.

Memo from the Nassau DA’s office

The memo also pointed out that officers are permitted to use physical force to “prevent the escape from custody.”

“Mr. Alvarenga’s injury seems to be the unintentional result of his own doing,” the memo states.

Alvarenga was admitted to Winthrop University Hospital complaining of sharp abdominal pain. He underwent emergency surgery to repair his small intestine.

He stayed in the hospital for a week. Over the next two months, he had three more abdominal surgeries, according to hospital records reviewed by Dr. Drew, who concluded that Alvarenga would suffer from bowel obstructions for the rest of his life.

The Hempstead Village board voted last May to finance the settlement with Alvarenga by borrowing $4.5 million through a bond sale.

Hempstead Village Attorney Cherice Vanderhall, who succeeded Urbano-DiSalvo, said in an interview that neither Falk nor Wade were disciplined for their conduct during the arrest.

Falk testified that neither Nassau County nor Hempstead police questioned him about Alvarenga’s arrest.

Transparency denied: Why LI’s major police forces patrol without widely used body cameras

Long Island’s two county police departments are among a small minority of America’s largest local law-enforcement agencies that have spurned broad use of body-worn cameras, even as deadly encounters between officers and unarmed Black people increased calls for greater police transparency and accountability.

A Newsday survey of the nation’s 50 largest law-enforcement agencies found just three that had not equipped large numbers of officers with body cameras before 2020: The Nassau and Suffolk police departments and the Portland Police Bureau, in Oregon.

Deployment of body cameras as standard police equipment extends from the nation’s largest force, the 35,000-member New York Police Department, to smaller agencies, including Freeport’s 100-officer department. It has occurred as law-enforcement authorities and the public have come to rely on video recordings to document crimes and police conduct.

With profound consequences, civilian cellphones captured the asphyxiation deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014 and George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, while body cameras recorded the suffocation of Daniel Prude last year in Rochester.

Long Islanders protested after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The Garner and Floyd videos generated protests that predominantly white police departments have used excessive force against unarmed Black people, with the Floyd recording reverberating nationwide, including on Long Island, where thousands of people participated in protests for weeks after his death.

Release of the Rochester body camera recordings, in response to a Freedom of Information Law request, prompted the resignations of the city’s police command. Body cameras also captured Floyd’s death, providing views at closer angles than the civilian cellphones, as well audio from police.

In February, Rochester police released body camera recordings of police handcuffing and placing a distressed 9-year-old girl in the back of a police car and pepper-spraying her. One officer was placed on suspension and two others were placed on leave.

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone this month called for equipping large numbers of officers with cameras after one of the few devices worn on the force captured officers kicking a handcuffed alleged car thief. Two officers were suspended; three were placed on modified duty. On March 11, he released a police reform plan that endorsed deploying body cameras on officers who interact with the public.

A still image from a Suffolk County police officer’s body camera recording of officers allegedly kicking a suspect.

In a police reform plan issued in February, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran endorsed widespread body camera use.

Overwhelmingly, leaders of advocacy groups representing Long Island’s Black and Hispanic communities said in Newsday interviews that recording interactions between police and civilians would help clarify what took place in circumstances that are often disputed.

Voicing mistrust of Long Island’s forces, many of these leaders saw the cameras as a tool for promoting accountability and public confidence in law enforcement — but not as the sole answer to calls for broader policing reforms.

Last June, amid protests over the Floyd killing, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo directed local governments to study their policing with the goal of finding ways “to foster trust, fairness, and legitimacy, and to address any racial bias and disproportionate policing of communities of color.” Cuomo ordered municipalities and counties to submit reform plans no later than April 1, 2021, or risk losing state funding.

Curran and Bellone formed task forces, consisting of law enforcement officials, lawmakers, civil rights activists and religious leaders, to help craft the plans.

The process hasn’t always been smooth, especially in Nassau, where the activists, dissatisfied with their input into the process, resigned and released their own reform proposal shortly after Curran delivered hers. That document included her body camera proposal.

In November, Curran had reached a contract agreement with the Superior Officers Association, representing sergeants, lieutenants and captains, that included a $3,000 annual stipend for wearing cameras. Members of the much larger Nassau Police Benevolent Association then rejected a deal that included the same terms.

Union leaders, who later resumed contract talks with county officials, have said body cameras were not the reason the deal was turned down and would more often help vindicate officers accused of misconduct.

“Cops know body cameras are coming,” Nassau PBA president James McDermott said. “There is no reluctance to body cameras.”

Before Curran’s actions, Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder questioned whether body cameras would deliver enough benefits to justify their costs — projecting those to be higher than estimates gathered by Newsday.

“Almost every incident that I’ve ever had in this department, we’ve found other video that got us what we needed — commercial video, people’s cellphone video, doorbell Ring video, our own cops taking video,” Ryder said last June. “There is so many different ways now not to just dump $15 million.”

In August, he estimated the amount to be even greater.

“Originally when we did the cost out it was about $25 million a year, and that is most all storage,” Ryder said, referring to the expense of paying a vendor to store videos on computer servers.

In Suffolk, the police department equipped its 10-member drunken-driving enforcement team with body cameras in 2017 to provide juries with video evidence of inebriated driving. One of those cameras recorded the officers kicking the alleged car thief.

In a Newsday interview before that incident, Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart said the department’s research has verified that body camera costs can add up.

“It confirmed what we already knew,” Hart said. “It is a very high cost, with the storage of the information being the highest.”

With each county required to negotiate with politically muscular police unions, power, money and pro-and-con activism will guide whether the Island’s major forces ultimately equip their officers with body cameras. The debate will play out at a time when many leading figures in policing and advocates for policing reform express support for deploying the devices.

Said former NYPD Commissioner William J. Bratton: “I think it is a mistake to oppose them. In the vast majority of incidents, body camera footage is favorable to the officers.”

Said Long Island Black Alliance co-founder Jackie Burbridge, who helped lead Black Lives Matter marches after Floyd’s death: “In a perfect world, I think we are better off with body cameras than without.”

LI cops are behind the times on body cameras

To gauge the prevalence of body cameras, Newsday surveyed 50 law-enforcement agencies that ranged in size from the 800-member force in Minneapolis to the NYPD, an organization some 40 times larger.

Their officers patrolled large cities, such as Chicago and Los Angeles, as well as populous suburban counties, such as Montgomery County, Maryland, outside Baltimore, and Fairfax County, Virginia, outside Washington D.C.

Forty-one forces currently equip large numbers of officers with body cameras, with six more on track to do so this year. Most have deployed the devices for more than two years.

The departments in Fort Worth, Texas, and Pittsburgh began using them as far back as 2012. Houston and Milwaukee followed in 2013. Honolulu, Boston, Phoenix and El Paso adopted cameras from 2018 to this January.

The St. Louis police department equipped 100 of its 800 officers last year in a long-delayed rollout begun after civil unrest sparked by the 2014 fatal police shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, in nearby Ferguson, Missouri.

The departments in Nashville, Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; Tampa, Florida; Fairfax County; and Prince George’s County, Maryland, began issuing the devices in late 2020 with plans to continue through 2021.

Joining the Nassau and Suffolk departments as one of the three major U.S. forces that has not adopted body cameras, the Portland Police Bureau serves a population of 2.1 million, roughly three-quarters of Long Island’s population as a whole. It shelved a body camera plan because of cost.

In contrast, the Baltimore Police Department — with 2,400 officers, similarly sized to the Nassau and Suffolk county departments — has equipped officers with cameras since 2016, the year after Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man, died of injuries suffered while being transported in a police van. The death touched off protests and riots.

A U.S. Department of Justice study, published as Baltimore was embarking on its body camera program, found that, at that time, about 80% of the nation’s largest local police departments, defined as having 500 or more full-time sworn officers, used the devices.

Newsday discovers: The true cost of body cams

Cecilia Dowd explains Newsday’s investigative findings about failed efforts to equip Long Island’s largest police forces with body cameras — and what they would expect to spend using them.

Money has been the obstacle most frequently cited by police and public officials when asked why the Island’s forces have not been equipped with body cameras. That obstacle has grown larger with the fiscal stress brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

Potential price tags provided to Newsday by the two largest companies that sell body camera services, as well as expenditures by other police agencies, suggest body camera programs would cost Nassau and Suffolk millions of dollars a year — but likely less than Ryder’s $15-million to $25-million projections.

As one bench mark, the NYPD is slated to spend $10.4 million in the current fiscal year on body camera technology to equip about 24,000 officers — a number 10 times larger than the size of Nassau County’s force.

Executives with Axon Enterprise and Motorola Solutions, the two largest companies in the body camera business, say the price tag to equip Nassau and Suffolk police would depend on how many officers the departments want to outfit and the service plans they purchase.

“It really depends on what their needs are and what they want to accomplish,” said Jeff Childs, director of national sales of Axon Enterprise Inc., the dominant vendor in the body camera business.

Axon sells its cameras for from $499 to $699 each, depending on the model. Based on those figures, a department wanting to outfit 1,900 officers — the approximate number of cops covered by the Nassau PBA and the Nassau Superior Officers Association — would make an upfront investment of from $948,000 to $1.3 million.

Axon’s least-expensive data plan costs $180 annually per officer and includes video storage, upload and sharing, GPS mapping of recordings and scheduled deletion of files. A county choosing this option would spend $342,000 annually to outfit 1,900 officers.

Axon’s most expensive plan costs $2,748 per user annually. At that rate, Suffolk and Nassau would each spend $5.2 million a year to equip 1,900 officers.

The plan combines body cameras with Taser electric stunning devices. (Axon was known as Taser International until 2017.) Axon stores recordings on a Microsoft cloud; enables departments to redact sensitive information, such as interviews with confidential informants and interactions with minors; and allows departments both to store video provided by the public and to livestream recordings.

It also provides officers with Tasers, holsters and online training. Body cameras come equipped with sensors that prompt cameras to record whenever officers draw Tasers or other weapons.

Motorola Solutions’ list price is $828 annually per user, according to a company spokeswoman. The package includes equipment worn by officers and management of recordings. At that price tag, the cost would be about $1.6 million per year to equip 1,900 officers.

For an additional charge, the system enables departments to combine video and audio from car and body cameras, as well as 911 calls and GPS locations. It also allows police to view incidents from multiple perspectives, integrate video into evidence and use batteries that can swap from one camera to the next, eliminating a need to take cameras out of service for recharging.

Across the country, police departments spend widely different amounts to operate body camera programs.

The Seattle Police Department, which issued body cameras to 1,000 officers in 2016, allocates about $1.5 million a year for body cameras and data storage, according to Nick Zajchowski, the manager of the agency’s body camera program. That works out to $1,500 annually per officer.

The Miami-Dade police force spends about $1.2 million a year to equip about 1,600 officers with body cameras, or $750 annually per cop, according to spokesman Det. Argemis Colome.

Freeport police department Chief Michael Smith and village Mayor Robert Kennedy explain their body camera program to Newsday’s Cecilia Dowd and videographer Chris Ware on Oct. 19, 2020.

Freeport, the first police department in New York state to mandate the use of body cameras, equips 87 of its 100 officers with body cameras, Mayor Robert T. Kennedy said. The department, after an initial outlay of about $150,000, spends about $32,800 a year on replacement cameras and docking stations as well as licensing and storage, or about $377 annually per officer.

The Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office spent about $100,000 last summer to purchase 70 body cameras, and a plan that includes video storage and integrates the devices with car cameras and Tasers, for the deputies who patrol the county’s East End.

In addition to the costs of the technology, Long Island’s two counties would each pay millions of dollars annually to compensate officers equipped with body cameras.

“If I’m a stockbroker who takes on additional accounts, I receive the benefit of compensation from those accounts. If I am a teacher who takes on the responsibility of extracurricular sports activities, I receive compensation for that,” said Suffolk PBA president Noel DiGerolamo. “Why is it that people expect police officers to not receive the compensation commensurate with the extra responsibilities being asked?”

The cost of paying $3,000 annual body camera stipends, as was included in Nassau PBA’s rejected contract, would total $5.7 million to cover 1,900 officers.

Suffolk pays the handful of its DWI enforcement officers who wear body cameras an additional 2.5% in compensation. The average member of the Suffolk Police Benevolent Association earned $102,581 in base pay last year listed on W-2 forms, according to a Budget Review Office memo.

Those figures point toward paying an additional $2,564 annually to the average officer, with a total bill of $4.9 million to cover 1,900 officers.

Up to $11 Million annually.About 1 % of each police department’s budget.

Adding up all the projections using Axon’s most expensive pricing, the labor and technology costs for each county climb into the neighborhood of $10.1 million for Suffolk’s department and $10.9 million for the Nassau force — roughly 1.2% of Suffolk’s $838.9 million annual budget and 1% of the Nassau PD’s $890.7 million spending plan.

Seven years of attempts and failures

Kyle Howell was 20 years old when he suffered a broken nose, fractures near both eyes and nerve damage to his face in a struggle with Nassau police officers inside a car during a traffic stop in 2014. The officers charged Howell with assault, resisting arrest and possession of marijuana.

Howell’s family then discovered a store surveillance recording that contradicted elements of the police account. Reversing course, the Nassau District Attorney’s Office dismissed the case and instead indicted Nassau Police Officer Vincent LoGiudice for allegedly assaulting Howell, hitting him at least 18 times with his fist, knee and flashlight.

LoGiudice’s trial turned on whether he was justified to use that degree of force, based on a reasonable belief that his life was in danger. Howell testified that he lunged across the console of the car to grab a bag of marijuana from the glove box. The police officer testified that he believed Howell may have been reaching across the vehicle for a gun.

Delivering a not-guilty verdict at the close of LoGiudice’s nonjury trial, Acting Supreme Court Justice Patricia Harrington said Howell had testified that he knew “the police might think that he was posing a risk to them and they might think he was reaching for a weapon” when he grabbed for the marijuana.

Harrington also said that the video, recorded from outside the car, did not capture a full view of the events.

“It only depicts part of the actions of the defendant, which when viewed alone are disturbing,” Harrington said in court. “But the question in this case is what was happening in that motor vehicle — that cannot be seen from the perspective of that video camera.”

Responding to Howell’s case, Nassau County Legis. Siela Bynoe, a Westbury Democrat, filed legislation in 2014 that would have required the county police to equip cops with body cameras. Body cameras could have revealed what had taken place in Howell’s car, Bynoe said in a January interview.

“If a camera had been on the body of the officer, the interaction would have been captured and we would have had a clear look at what had occurred,” Bynoe said.

Without support from the legislature’s Republicans, who were in the majority, the bill never moved to the floor for a vote.

In 2015, then-County Executive Edward Mangano, a Republican, and then-Acting Police Commissioner Thomas Krumpter announced a pilot program to test the use of body cameras by outfitting 31 officers from the First, Third and Fifth precincts with the devices.

Police unions complained to the state Public Employment Relations Board that the department had violated labor law by failing to discuss body cameras with them.

“Whenever our members could be the subject of any type of discipline, whether it’s warranted or not, the union should have a say in how the body cameras are implemented,” then-Nassau PBA President James Carver said in December 2015.

The board directed the county and the police unions to engage in “impact bargaining,” which covers workplace changes that could affect employees’ work conditions. In this case, body cameras were not just new pieces of equipment, such as bulletproof vests, because recordings could be used to discipline officers.

The talks foundered, and Krumpter abandoned plans to equip Nassau police officers with body cameras.

“We reserved the right to review the video and we reserved the right to document misconduct in the video,” he recalled in an interview. “Anything that would encroach on that was a non-starter for the police department at that time.”

Krumpter is now chief of the 12-member Lloyd Harbor village police department, which is not equipped with body cameras. Still, he’s a proponent of the technology while being wary of its expense.

“The pilot would have showed whether the body cameras program was right for Nassau County. Did the benefits outweigh the significant costs? I would tend to believe so,” he said.

Suffolk Chief of Department Stuart Cameron said his department equipped its 10-member DWI enforcement team rather than the entire force based on a judgment that the costs would be too high when matched against the number of civilian complaints filed against officers.

“When you have a finite budget, you have to make decisions like that,” Cameron said, while also predicting that the need to recharge batteries and download videos “would definitely hurt response times” because Suffolk officers change shifts in the field rather than at a precinct roll call.

The impact of recording police in action

Brian Garcia and Michael Palazzo both wish that body cameras had long been standard equipment for Long Island’s police forces.

Palazzo is a former Nassau County cop. He says that a body camera could have saved his police career after a private security video contradicted details of his testimony about a 2017 drunken driving arrest — and prompted judges to reduce or dismiss charges in more than 60 of his arrests.

One of the body cameras used by Freeport police.

Regardless of the contradictions between his testimony and the video, Palazzo contends that the sights and sounds captured by a body camera would have shown that he was correct in making the arrest.

“I’m for body cameras, 100 percent,” Palazzo said.

Brian Garcia was pulled over on the Sunken Meadow Parkway by Suffolk County cops in 2016. He charges in a lawsuit that the officers had no grounds to stop him, that he was handcuffed for no reason and that the officers without cause pulled his pants down to his ankles on the side of the road to search him. In response, the county in court filings argued that the officers had probable cause to pull over and search Garcia.

“It would have made an impact” had the officers worn body cameras, Garcia said. “Maybe they wouldn’t have been able to fully do the traumatizing things they did.”

More than 24,000 NYPD police officers are equipped with body cameras, and those devices have been a plus for the New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, according to a CCRB report released in February 2020.

The report said body cameras have enabled officials to determine what occurred during an increased number of incidents that resulted in complaints.

Between May 2017 and June 2019, the CCRB fully investigated 318 complaints related to incidents captured by body cameras, according to the report. The panel determined the facts in 76% of the cases, compared with 39% of cases that lacked video evidence, the report stated.

“During the past two years alone, body-worn cameras have transformed civilian oversight of police in New York City, and it’s clear that this technology is here to stay,” the Rev. Fred Davie, the CCRB chairman, wrote in the report.

Brian Kelly, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Farmingdale State College, said his research shows that most cops and police unions believe body cameras protect cops from false allegations.

“If I’m conducting myself by the book, in a positive light, we want that as evidence,” said Kelly, a former Essex County, New Jersey, investigator and NJ Transit police officer. “Most of the time, what you see on a body camera is exactly what happened.”

Studies conducted in Rialto, California, a city of 100,000, and Las Vegas found correlations between the introduction of body cameras and reductions in complaints against police and the use of force by officers. Research in Washington, D.C., failed to detect similar trends.

Seth Stoughton, an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina who has studied body cameras, said the Washington study should temper expectations about the technology.

“You have to be realistic about the possibilities of body cameras,” Stoughton said. “Body cameras are not always the best use of a department’s money.”

Police reform activists call for body cams

Tracey Edwards is the Long Island NAACP regional director, a member of a task force appointed by Bellone to recommend policing reforms — and was also among the community leaders who resigned from Curran’s task force over reform plan disagreements. She believes that Long Island officials should embrace equipping officers with body cameras.

“We should use every tool we can to protect the community and officers, and body cameras are one of those tools,” Edwards said. “This is not an ‘us vs. them’ situation. We need to use technology to promote transparency, and body cameras need to be part of that discussion.”

Serena Liguori is director of New Hour for Women and Children, a nonprofit dedicated to helping incarcerated women and their children. As co-leader of the Long Island Social Justice Action Network, she helped organize Black Lives Matter protests after Floyd’s killing. She has a seat on Bellone’s task force.

“Body cameras will be part of the Long Island Social Justice Action Network agenda. They keep officers safe. They keep the public safe. I think it is a win-win,” said Liguori, whose network is a coalition of 34 community groups dedicated to statewide criminal justice reform.

Edwards and Liguori are among the leaders of nine Long Island civil rights and social justice organizations who expressed opinions about equipping Nassau and Suffolk police with body cameras in interviews with Newsday. Their groups have roots in both counties, as well as in the Black and Hispanic communities.

Overwhelmingly, they backed making cameras standard equipment on the county forces to increase transparency and public trust. Many said that they see the devices as only one part of a police reform agenda and that they are concerned about how the county departments would regulate their use.

“I do believe that what we have seen from national news, that sometimes the body cameras are indeed very helpful, to help with accountability,” said Elaine Gross, president of ERASE Racism, a regional civil rights organization based on Long Island. “We’ve seen that video in general has really changed the landscape.”

One activist opposed spending money on body cameras.

Lucas Sanchez, deputy director of New York Communities for Change, said that police budgets should be cut in favor of spending money on services including health care, job training and education. He also said that a camera program would mask the need for new approaches to policing.

“They are a way for elected officials and police chiefs to say, ‘We did something,’ but nothing has fundamentally changed in their department,” said Sanchez, who said his organization has 20,000 members statewide, including 4,500 located mostly in the Island’s minority communities.

“We believe we should be slashing the budget of the police and use the money to give communities services that help working people,” Sanchez said.

Body cameras came to the fore as an issue for many of the activists following Floyd’s killing and Cuomo’s police reform order.

“We haven’t pushed for it as an advocacy issue,” said Theresa Sanders, president of the Long Island Urban League, who was appointed to police reform task forces formed both by Bellone and Curran. “But now with the current climate and everyone looking at how we can make our communities safer for everybody, that is a topic of discussion.”

E. Reginald Pope, president of the Nassau County chapter of the National Action Network, headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton, said Long Island agencies have resisted implementing body cameras because they have a history of secrecy about officer misconduct.

“Because of their practices and their behaviors, they don’t want to be recorded,” said Pope, who said his civil rights and social justice organization has about 150 members in Nassau and Suffolk.

While supporting the introduction of body cameras, Susan Gottehrer, president of the Nassau chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said such a program would represent only a small step toward reform.

“It doesn’t address the systemic change that is necessary,” said Gottehrer, who called body cameras “low-hanging fruit” for officials eager to appear concerned about police reforms.

Nathalia Varela, associate counsel at LatinoJustice, called body cameras “one piece of a bigger puzzle” and said her organization calls for “appropriate training, policies and restrictions on data use” to prevent police from, for example, maintaining video files on selected individuals.

LatinoJustice is waging a class-action lawsuit alleging that the Suffolk County Police Department had engaged in a pattern of discrimination against Latinos.

Shanequa Levin is co-founder of the Long Island Black Alliance, which has more than 300 members and helped organize protests in Nassau and Suffolk after Floyd’s death.

“We know [body cameras] are not 100% perfect,” she said. “But they are a start to keeping police accountable.”

LI pols and police unions will decide

Freeport Police Officer Donnetta Cumberbatch describes the body camera she wears on patrol as a “safety net” that can dispel civilian complaints — typically a “my-word-against-yours kind of thing” — with documentary evidence.

“It keeps us honest, productive, and it’s definitely a good thing,” Cumberbatch said. “I don’t understand why [there] would be any hesitation having them.”

Kennedy, the village mayor, said the program’s $32,800-a-year cost is well worth the price.

“My officers don’t want to go out in the field without a body camera. They just feel it protects them. And it’s good for the residents,” said Kennedy, who also serves as police commissioner.

In 2019, body cameras captured a struggle in which Freeport officers punched, kicked and Tased 45-year-old Akbar Rogers as they arrested him on a harassment warrant after an alleged high-speed chase. A witness recorded the struggle on a cellphone.

After reviewing the body camera recordings, which have never been released, Nassau District Attorney Madeline Singas announced that the evidence did not support prosecuting the officers for using excessive force. She also dropped an assault charge lodged against Rogers.

He has filed a lawsuit that names as defendants eight Freeport police officers — two are Kennedy’s sons — Nassau County, the Village of Freeport and their police departments.

With a track record extending more than five years, Freeport’s force is the only local example of the costs and benefits of body cameras as Long Island elected officials and law enforcement leaders consider reforms. Whether Nassau follows Freeport’s example will play out amid conflict between its government and community leaders.

Civil rights lawyer Frederick Brewington, who had served as co-chairman of Curran’s police reform panel — before he and other advocates resigned over what they said was a lack of input into the county’s plan — said police departments should not pay officers to wear body cameras.

“It’s like paying them to put on bulletproof vests,” he said. “It is another part of their equipment.”

Away from the negotiating table, they have wielded the power of campaign money.

“The PBAs in both counties are the most powerful public unions on Long Island,” said former Suffolk County Executive Patrick Halpin.

Kevan Abrahams, the Nassau legislature’s Democratic minority leader, expressed frustration with the PBA’s power.

“It’s crazy, but with something like this, where you’re trying to add a level of transparency and accountability, yes, unfortunately, they hold the cards because it needs to be in their collective bargaining agreement,” said Abrahams, who represents Freeport. “It frustrates me to the core.”