An NYPD officer has been docked 30 days’ pay after being found guilty of kneeling on the back of a suspect in Manhattan who was reportedly in emotional distress and pleaded, “I can’t breathe,” according to sources at the Daily News.
The disciplinary action against Officer Gabriel Perez-Ponce was enforced by NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in September. This decision followed a departmental trial where an NYPD judge, with evidence presented by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, concluded that the officer’s conduct warranted punishment.
Officer Perez-Ponce’s partner, Officer Cesar Mejia, opted for retirement before a similar departmental trial could be conducted at the NYPD’s headquarters in One Police Plaza, Lower Manhattan, as reported by the CCRB.
Documents released by the NYPD detail the incident, highlighting that the suspect, identified only by the initials P.C., remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back for over seven minutes. The situation was only rectified when a supervising officer arrived and instructed the officers to “Sit him up.”
The individual in question, who was 27 years old at the time, was subsequently transported to Bellevue Hospital for medical evaluation and care.
P.C., 27 at the time, was then taken to Bellevue Hospital for treatment.
“[Perez-Ponce’s] actions on the date in question posed a significant risk to P.C’s well-being and could have resulted in more dire consequences,” NYPD Judge Vanessa Facio-Lince wrote in her summary of the case.
It took more than five years to adjudicate the case, in part because of COVID delays.
The incident, in Chinatown on Feb. 11, 2020, happened six years after Eric Garner’s similar plea of “I can’t breathe” as he was arrested by Staten Island NYPD cops became a rallying cry for social justice activists in the wake of his death.
And just three months after the 2020 Chinatown incident, George Floyd was murdered by a Minnesota cop who pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes.
The Floyd murder lead to a New York City law making it a crime to compress a suspect’s diaphragm.
According to the documents in P.C.’s case, the officers were first called to a drug treatment center on Essex St., where a staffer told them P.C. was having a mental health episode and talking about killing himself.
P.C. had already left the location but the officers got his description, found him nearby and arranged for him to go to a hospital, as P.C.requested.
But he apparently wasn’t at the hospital for long, with Perez-Ponce and Mejia about three hours later being called to Division St. near Canal St. by a woman who said there was a shirtless man swinging a stick or pipe.
It was P.C., who ran when the officers approached.
They chased him, took him to the ground and handcuffed him, his hands behind his back as he lay on the ground, the judge wrote.
The officers, she said, held him “down on the ground with their hands and knees while they called for an ambulance and backup.”
When a lieutenant arrived he had Perez-Ponce and Mejia lift P.C. into a sitting position.
The evidence presented at trial includes the partners’ body-worn camera videos, plus other videos.
P.C., who urged bystanders to record what was happening, did not resist during the encounter or appear to try to escape, the judge noted.
Instead, she wrote, he was clearly worried about his well-being, citing video of the clash.
“P.C. is audibly upset, in that he is crying and grunting at various points during the encounter, but remains still on the ground while in the officers’ custody. [Perez-Ponce] and Officer Mejia’s hands and knees are on P.C.’s back, keeping him pinned to the ground … At about the one minute mark, P.C. can be heard saying in sum and substance: “I got a bad heart, I got asthma! He’s kneeing me in my chest,” and “I can’t breathe.”
Eric Garner
Perez-Ponce testifited that he kept P.C. on the ground because he was being “very erratic” and a “flight risk.”
He claimed he wasn’t kneeling on the man’s back but rather “touching” P.C.’s right shoulder with his knee and that P.C. never “showed any signs of distress.”
The judge called that claim “a distinction without a diifference,” noting that pressure on either spot “may result in reducng the subject’s ability to brathe and (are) expressly prohibited by the Patrol Guide.”
The judge agreed with the CCRB that Perez-Ponce was guilty of violating the department’s force guidelines and that he should lose 30 days pay. Tisch, without eleborating signed off on that recommendation.
AP
George Floyd responds to police after they approached his car outside Cub Foods in Minneapolis in this May 25, 2020 image from police body camera video.
Perez-Ponce, who joined the NYPD in January 2017, is back on patrol at the 7th Precinct, the same command he was assigned to at the time of the incident. He did not respond to a request for comment and his lawyer had no comment.
Mejia, who joined the department in April 2017, resigned in September 2021. The CCRB by then had recommended Mejia also be charged with violating the department’s force guidelines by using a prohibited method of restraint.
Mejia could not be reached for comment.
P.C. told the CCRB he had been hospitalized at various times because he has a mental hearlth issue that causes him to act erratically. He could not be reached for comment.
