Beaten, blindfolded pepper spray, shackled like animals, and indiscriminately arrested for marching against police violence and racial injustice. Such is the fate that hundreds of people suffered at the hands of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers in late May and early June 2020, when thousands of people across the United States protested the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Three years later, a class action lawsuit resulted in New York City agreeing to pay $9,950 each to approximately 1,380 protesters as part of a settlement. According to the legal team behind the class action, which cost taxpayers more than $13 million, it is the largest amount paid to protesters in US history.
The lawyers reached a settlement with the help of a little-known tool that helps them quickly categorize and analyze terabytes of video footage from police cameras, surveillance helicopters and social media. “We have had weeks of protests. We had rallies spread all over New York City. We’ve had thousands of arrests, said David Rankin, a partner at the law firm Beldock, Levine & Hoffman, who was part of the protesters’ legal team. “We have tens of thousands of hours of body footage, we have text messages, we have email, we have an absolute volume of data to get through.”
The path through all this data is etched by Codec, a video classification tool developed by civil liberties-focused design agency SITU Research. Launched in June 2022, the tool is proving essential in legal battles around the world, where various hours of video footage can reveal staged, state-backed violence against protesters.
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Dozens of videos shared with WIRED show how the legal team built their case. Using this data, which also includes geospatial information, timestamps and categories of alleged misconduct, we were able to build a map that would allow anyone to track the police incidents that are at the heart of the case. Each dot represents an incident that the legal team considers police misconduct. Of the 72 videos that the legal team flagged as most relevant to their case, the map includes 47 videos captured by police agency or surveillance cameras. The locations of the remaining 25 videos, apparently taken from social media and other sources, are also pinpointed on the map. In total, the legal team analyzed more than 6,300 videos.
Some videos on the map contain violent imagery and viewers should exercise caution. The video will play automatically when the sound is on.
Video evidence was gathered from a variety of sources, including police cameras and helicopters. SITU Research geolocated the data and provided it to WIRED.
Among the videos we’ve reviewed, an NYPD officer can be seen running down the sidewalk while pepper-spraying a person leaning against a building, completely out of sight of the officer. In another video, an officer smashes a protester with a car door while driving down the street. Another video shows a group of officers interlacing their hands as one of them says, “It’s like we’ve been practicing.” Officers then charged a group of protesters before picking one on the sidewalk and beating them with batons. Taken together, the footage shows widespread, systematic police misconduct during protests that lasted from May 28 to June 4, 2020, across multiple New York City neighborhoods, according to the lawsuit.
While looting and vandalism took place in some neighborhoods during the protests, the demonstrations were largely peaceful. The defendants in the lawsuit did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, and the city attorney denied the attempt was orchestrated to violate protesters’ rights. Reached for comment, the NYPD referred WIRED to the city’s Law Department, which has yet to respond to a request for comment.
Remy Green, a partner at Cohen & Green and a member of the protesters’ legal team, said police use of body-worn cameras, touted as a step in the right direction for civil liberties, has become “a sort of countermeasure to police brutality.” A single video can only reveal so much, says Green, and police departments can use this limitation to hide what really happened. The protests were met with an extreme police response demanding a miniature vantage point, which is something the Codec has allowed the legal team to create. “It gives you a more holistic view of the activities that have taken place,” says Green.
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The idea to use Codecs in the lawsuit came from a related lawsuit that was settled earlier this year. Here, Human Rights Watch Worked at SITU Research to analyze video footage of protests in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, one of New York City’s five boroughs. Their work demonstrated that the NYPD used an anti-protest tactic known as “kettleling”—trapping a group of people so that they could not escape—right before a government-imposed curfew, thus ensuring that they violated the order. In March, a lawsuit against the city over the NYPD’s use of kettles ended in a controversy. $21,500 payout to each of more than 300 Mott Haven protesters, estimated to be the highest settlement per person for a mass arrest in US history. NYPD said in a statement after the settlement from which it “reimagined” “policies and training to control large-scale protests.”
saw forensic video investigation SITU on the Mott Haven protests was produced, Rankin asked for help conducting a similar investigation. But this time it will not focus on police behavior during a single protest in a neighborhood, but on demonstrations across New York City.
