When a 26-year-old office worker was protesting in Mott Haven last Thursday, she was among 1,349 people issued summonses for violating the 8 p.m. curfew during New York City’s historic, six-night lockdown. But though her charge was minor, she said she was beaten with a baton and sent to a holding cell in Queens, where she sat for hours before ultimately getting nothing but a summons.

“I was expressing my First Amendment right,” said the Bronx resident Iliana, who requested we only use her first name. She’s since stopped protesting, fearful of additional repercussions. “I can’t get in trouble for another six months or else I will get charges. That’s a real deterrent.”

Despite being an offense that usually merits a ticket, the 1,349 New Yorkers found in violation of the curfew were detained by police, and taken into confined holding cells in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to curfew violations, the NYPD made 1,126 arrests across charges from burglary to unlawful assembly between May 28th and June 7th. All but 39 arrests and detentions were for non-violent offenses. In those 39, police arrested people for assaulting an officer. Most were issued in the days prior to the 8:00 p.m. curfew June 2nd. The department did not provide information about disorderly conduct arrests.

Listen to Gwynne Hogan's report on WNYC:

The arrests during the protests against racist police violence, spurred by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, far surpassed recent mass arrests by the NYPD. The nearly 2,500 arrests and detention over those 11 days exceeded the mass arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention, when 1,800 people were jailed. The NYPD settled for $18 million for unlawful detentions years later. During Occupy Wall Street, more than 700 were arrested in 2011; 93 percent were dismissed. Black Lives Matter marches in 2014 avoided large-scale arrests of protesters.

In an interview with Gothamist/WNYC, NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan, the department’s highest ranking officer, defended the low-level arrests and detainment for curfew violations.

“By having that curfew in place at 11, it helped us tamp down some of what was going on with the very large crowds that were running around,” Monahan said. “Once the violence stopped, that’s when we really didn’t need to enforce the curfew as much anymore. That curfew helped us get the city back under control. As it was for those [first] four days, it was a very dangerous place to be in New York City.”

Monahan insisted that the police “needed to get control back on the streets.”

“There wasn't a worry about social distancing when crowds of hundreds, if not thousands, were running together in the streets, looting the stores,” he said. “Those that we were able to catch right away, were charged with the burglary. Those that would spill out after the curfew, running around through those streets, were the ones that were charged with the curfew violations. … This isn’t your normal two guys on a street corner let’s give them a summons.”

Those issued curfew violation summonses were mostly Black or Hispanic; 569 were Black or Black and Hispanic, 280 were white Hispanics, 413 were white, 59 were Asian, and 28 were not known. About 999 were men. The breakdown of race for arrests unrelated to curfew violations was not provided.

Hundreds of arrested protesters were illegally held for more than 24 hours before seeing a judge. Last week, the Legal Aid Society sued to release hundreds held longer than a day pre-arraignment. That request was later denied by a judge (the group has appealed). At the height of the backlog, about 400 people were held more than a day, which was cleared by June 5th, an Office of Court Administration spokesperson confirmed.

Among them was a Canadian reporter who traveled to NYC to cover the unrest, Anna Slatz with Rebel News, a far-right Canadian news site.

Slatz was detained for two days after being arrested for “disorderly conduct” after she said police grabbed her by the throat and threw her to the ground outside a looted Zara in Midtown on June 2nd. She repeatedly screamed "media is exempted" while officers screamed at her, "go the fuck home!" according to video. She said she was ferried between holding cells in Brooklyn and Manhattan, subsisting on moldy sandwiches with a dozen other women.

“There were cockroaches everywhere you couldn’t sit without sitting on a cockroach,” said Slatz, 24, whose case was tossed out by a judge Thursday morning, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office confirmed. “There were piles of vomit on the floor. It was just disgusting.”

“It’s very frustrating that they’re disappearing people,” Legal Aid Society staff attorney Jennvine Wong said.

“Getting hung up on multiple times, being told one thing about where someone was and then finding out that person was not actually there, that person was someone else,” said Wong, raising implications of possible Sixth Amendment rights violations, the right to a speedy trial. “I don’t know for sure if they were trying to thwart efforts of lawyers to reach our clients and to invoke their rights on their behalf, but it certainly doesn't reflect well on them that they started doing this.”

Monahan blamed it on lack of capacity at the 1 Police Plaza mass arrest processing center, especially through June 2nd.

“There were groups, groups of hundreds, running through the streets, burning things, going through stores. We had to grab members of those groups that were running together,” Monahan said. “These are the individuals running through the streets, large crowds of people running together, throwing bottles burning things up. We had to dismantle these groups. It was a tough, tough task for all our cops. But these were the ones that were causing mayhem. We were lucky that unlike other cities, our buildings didn't burn.”

But Jessica Enriquez was held for nearly a day at the Queens Detention Center, saying she spent hours with her hands zip-tied and turning blue, after protesting in the Bronx June 4th.

“It was 17 hours for a curfew that we could have potentially avoided if they let us go,” said the 22-year-old, who got a Desk Appearance Ticket for unlawful assembly. “We were never given that chance.”