A rally and march Saturday outside Roosevelt Field mall in Garden City commemorated Tuesday’s anniversary of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and ramped up pressure on Nassau County to establish independent bodies to investigate police misconduct.
“As we approach the 25th, we’ve got to remind people that a human life was taken with no particular need and no justification,” said Frederick K. Brewington, a civil rights lawyer and member of Long Island Advocates for Police Accountability, which has assailed police-reform plans in Nassau and Suffolk as offering little or no real reform. “And we need to change policing in Nassau County, in Suffolk County and across America so we don’t experience that again.”
A similar, simultaneous march was scheduled Saturday afternoon in Wyandanch, in Suffolk County.
Last June, in the wake of Floyd’s murder, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo required municipalities to submit police reform plans to the state by April 1.
George Floyd died May 25, 2020, when Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. Chauvin was convicted in April of murder and manslaughter.
After a rally in a parking lot across from the mall, the more than 60 participants got down on one knee, raised their fists and observed a moment of silence for Floyd before a brief march in the unseasonable heat along the typically traffic-clogged Old Country Road.
Brewington said he wished County Executive Laura Curran and Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder were at the demonstration because “when they want to have discussions, they go talk to themselves. They don’t talk to us.”
Brewington and other members of a county community advisory panel on police reform resigned in January after they said county and police officials ignored their input into what was then a draft police reform plan. The police plan was formally submitted to the state April 1.
County spokesman Michael Fricchione said in a statement there had been “hundreds of meetings and countless hours of input from community stakeholders,” that “the plan contains robust oversight,” and “the Nassau Police Reform Plan passed the legislature in a bi-partisan manner.”
Cheryl Keshner, a member of United for Justice in Policing Long Island, said the Nassau Legislature’s 16-3 vote to approve the police reform plan — its three Black legislators voted against it — amounted to a rubber stamp of a plan that is “a regurgitation of what already exists. It is not an honest effort to make change or to acknowledge the lingering systemic racism and bias within the department.”
The plan doesn’t contain what rally participants say is critical: Independent bodies to investigate police misconduct.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a letter last month that the Nassau plan failed “to create meaningful checks on law enforcement.”
Rally participant Dennis Jones, 59, of Valley Stream, said an independent Civilian Complaint Review Board and an office of police inspector general were needed because “it’s very difficult for police to discipline themselves.”
Jones is a retired NYPD detective who, he said, has seen from the inside how officers don’t want to reveal or discuss colleagues’ misconduct.
“That officer is going to be deemed a rat,” he said. “He’s going to be ostracized. No one’s ever going to want to work with him again, or her.”
Saturday’s rally was one of several events in recent weeks aimed at establishing the independent bodies.
Terryl Dozier, a steering committee member of Long Island United to Transform Policing and Community Safety, said the pressure would continue.
“We will chant louder, we will march longer, we will rally bigger,” he said. “We will be the face they will see in every legislature hearing. We will be the unwanted questions they get during the candidate forums.”
Brewington called on Cuomo to reject the Nassau plan and withhold state funding for the Nassau police department until true reforms are made.
But officials with the governor’s office said in an email Saturday that, under the June executive order, Cuomo does not approve plans; that is up to each jurisdiction, such as Nassau County.
“The process was designed to give local officials and stakeholders flexibility to develop and publicly approve a plan that best meets their community’s needs,” the governor’s office said.
David Olson covers health care. He has worked at Newsday since 2015 and previously covered immigration, multicultural issues and religion at The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.
