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Gripped by the coronavirus pandemic, New York City is experiencing the largest volume of emergency phone calls in its history. During a single day last month, the New York Times reported, dispatchers answered around seven thousand calls, even more than on September 11, 2001. With more than a hundred thousand cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the city, there is overwhelming demand for emergency medical workers — but not for law enforcement officers. New York City police are actually receiving fewer dispatches now than they were prior to the crisis. After the city’s emergency social distancing measures took effect last month, reports of the seven most serious crimes, including robbery and assault, went down substantially. Still, in the weeks since the shutdown, New York City police officers have repeatedly restrained, arrested, and even assaulted New Yorkers attempting to navigate the tense atmosphere of enforced social distancing in the city. New York cops aren’t helping fight the worst outbreak of coronavirus in the world — they’re making things far worse.

Brutality as Usual Mayor Bill de Blasio has instructed the NYPD to ensure that all people maintain six feet of personal distance when moving about in public, creating a force of seven hundred designated patrol officers to enforce the new coronavirus rules. Now, New Yorkers who cannot self-isolate, including many essential workers, regularly encounter groups of anxious and undertrained patrol officers who are eager to enforce social distancing but, in many cases, unwilling to do so without resorting to violence and abuse. On the night of Friday, March 27, after police pepper-sprayed a gathering in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, three residents became the first people to be arrested for failing to comply with the city’s social distancing order. (They were all charged with obstructing governmental administration, unlawful assembly, and disorderly conduct.) The Intercept reported that one of those arrested, a thirty-seven-year-old woman, was then transported to Brooklyn central booking, where she was held for thirty-six hours in a cell with more than twenty other women, with no soap available. (At the time, the infection rate among people incarcerated in New York City was 5.1 percent. It is now a staggering 7.8 percent.) Two weeks later, on Friday, April 10, a group of NYPD officers approached a boy they believed to be “about eight years of age” as he rode the subway in Harlem. After accusing him of illegally selling candy and snack foods to other passengers, the officers dragged the boy off the train. A witness’s video shows the officers, most of them unmasked, forming a tight circle around the boy on the subway platform. One officer strips the boy’s jacket from his body. Another officer kicks a shopping bag filled with the boy’s snacks in the direction of the open tracks. As he cries, the police begin to haul the boy away. Throughout it all, a woman stands near the officers, repeatedly insisting that the boy is her son. (The NYPD issued a terse statement about the incident, reporting that officers later called the Administration for Children’s Services and issued a summons for disorderly conduct to the boy’s stepfather, who was also present.) The same day, a group of seven patrol officers forcibly removed a man from the 149th Street–Grand Concourse station in handcuffs as bystanders shouted in his defense. According to a witness at the scene, the officers became offended after the man pointed out that there was no room on the crowded train platform for commuters to maintain six feet of distance as instructed. Another video, captured a few days earlier, shows police in the Bronx arguing with bystanders as several officers stand above a prostrate man with cuffs on his wrists. None of the officers wear masks or gloves. One officer punches a woman in her face, sending her falling backward into a group of onlookers. Finally, an onlooker approaches the scuffle and, after slapping one officer in the side of the head, flees down the street. Police later arrested thirty-one-year-old Nelson Jimenez, suspecting him of being the onlooker in the video; Jimenez was charged with assault on a police officer, disorderly conduct, and obstructing government administration. De Blasio described the incident as a “cowardly, despicable attack on our New York’s Finest,” and thanked the NYPD for “going above and beyond the call of duty… in this crisis.” The NYPD Sergeants Benevolent Association later tweeted a heavily edited video clip of the incident, with the message: “COVID-19 plagues thousands but the same scumbags continue to roam the streets.” Presumably, they meant Jimenez — not the six uniformed police officers who the video shows repeatedly pushing, shoving, and punching bystanders who come near them, even as multiple onlookers audibly beg the patrolmen not to put their bare hands on members of the crowd that had gathered, horrified, to watch.