NYC Council to probe training, budget of controversial NYPD unit at upcoming hearing

The City Council’s public safety committee will meet on Wednesday to discuss a controversial NYPD unit accused of using overly aggressive tactics with few guardrails and minimal oversight.

Councilmembers will discuss calls to regulate — or even disband — the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, also known as the SRG, which is charged with responding to public demonstrations and protests. The Council is expected to hear testimony from police officials and activists.

Some watchdogs and police reform advocates say the SRG lacks proper training to respond to demonstrations and that its members tend to escalate encounters with civilians rather than calm them.

The hearing, which was initially scheduled for December, has been postponed twice, prompting some councilmembers and activists to press City Hall to act with more urgency.

The NYPD did not respond to specific questions from Gothamist, but a spokesperson said in a statement that the unit is “highly trained” and responds to “citywide mobilizations, civil disorders and major events” as well as “areas requiring an increased police presence due to increased crime or other conditions.”

“With multiple missions that include disorder response, crime suppression, and crowd control, the Strategic Response Group and the officers assigned have proven to be a critical asset for the Department,” the spokesperson said.

The unit is perhaps best known for its role in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. While officers from various units worked at the demonstrations, the SRG has been accused of using some of the most aggressive crowd control strategies.

A Department of Investigation report from December 2020 found that the SRG’s tactics “may have unnecessarily provoked confrontations between police and protesters, rather than de-escalating tensions.”

Training materials obtained and published by The Intercept show the unit has been taught to encircle crowds — a tactic also referred to as “kettling” — leaving protesters with nowhere to escape before a mass arrest. Officers allegedly used this tactic against peaceful protesters at a June 2020 demonstration in Mott Haven in the Bronx, prompting Human Rights Watch to call the department’s response a violation of international human rights law, and to issue its own 99-page report on the events in Mott Haven. That report found officers used batons, beat people, pushed protesters to the ground, and pepper sprayed them “unprovoked and without warning.”

Hundreds of lawsuits challenging the NYPD response to the 2020 protests are winding their way through the courts, including one brought by Attorney General Letitia James. Hundreds more complaints were filed with the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board — some regarding the actions of SRG members. The CCRB released a nearly 600-page report on 2020 protest complaints last month, which recommended that the department retrain all officers on crowd control tactics.

The SRG started as a counterterrorism unit in 2015 and was supposed to have 350 members, Gothamist reported at the time. As of last fall, 501 police were assigned to a team with a $68.3 million budget, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.

The unit’s mandate has also morphed over the years to include responses to protests, parades and other major events, according to the NYPD website. The website says the group is also called in for some shootings, bank robberies, missing person cases and the catchall category of “other significant incidents.”

Sam Rick, a volunteer protest monitor who has witnessed the police response to dozens of protests in the last couple years, said she doesn’t understand what purpose the unit serves at demonstrations. She doesn’t feel like it is helping protesters or keeping them safe.

“It’s been hard to watch this unit and the NYPD as a whole treat the protesters the way they have,” Rick said. “I have left some protests and just gone home and been crying just seeing what I’ve seen, seeing the arrests I’ve seen.”

The 2020 Department of Investigation report recommended that the NYPD “re-evaluate” the group’s role at protests and create a new unit to respond to demonstrations without riot gear, unless “necessary.” The City Council is also considering a bill, sponsored by Councilmember Chi Ossé, that would prohibit the NYPD from sending the unit to nonviolent demonstrations. Ossé and more than a dozen other councilmembers have signed an open letter, urging the city to disband the SRG. The NYCLU also wants the police department to dissolve the unit.

At Wednesday’s hearing, councilmembers will have the opportunity to question the department about its training, tactics and budget. Community members will also have the opportunity to share their experiences interacting with the unit during protests.

NYCLU Assistant Policy Director Michael Sisitzky hopes the hearing will better equip city lawmakers to regulate the SRG and other police units, if they can hear from people who have been encircled, had bicycles used as weapons against or been hit with pepper spray in a crowd.

“All of these tactics, which are pretty much synonymous with the SRG’s violence at protests, are all things that the Council needs to be thinking about in terms of making sure there are clear limits on what the NYPD as a whole can do when they show up to protests,” Sisitzky said. “Without clear limits in local law, we run the risk of the NYPD still continuing these types of abuses.”