In October 2016, Malik Thomas, then 16, went to pick up groceries for his mom in the Staten Island neighborhood of Port Richmond. But instead of returning home with milk and tissues, he was arrested by policemen who accused him of involvement in a mugging.

With her son disappearing into a maze of police and court jails for three days, his mother and a former judge searched for him in vain, only eventually learning of his whereabouts when a local newspaper wrote that he had been “nabbed” for a crime the family alleges the police fabricated.

“The police falsely arrested me and refused to let me call my mom or to call her for me,” Thomas, now 18, told the Guardian. “They held me in a cell with a guy who appeared to be in his 50s. He took up the whole bench. I had to sleep on the dirty floor.”

The family learned of the accusations via an article in the Staten Island Advance, a newspaper run by the Newhouse family, which also owns Vogue and the New Yorker. The article stated the address of Thomas and his mother, a domestic abuse victim.

The family has decided to fight back, suing the police for perjury and civil rights violations, claiming the police report about Thomas contained falsehoods. But more unusually they are also suing the Advance newspaper reporter, Maura Grunlund, claiming she cited the allegedly false police report knowing it was incorrect.

“The police behavior in this story is very common,” Monifa Bandele, vice-president of MomsRising, an activist group representing mothers, told the Guardian. “As we learned during the [recent] stop and frisk litigation [against the controversial police practice in New York], just 0.3% of stops led to jail sentences of more than 30 days, and 0.1% led to convictions for a violent crime.”

Judge Ronald Gregg, a retired New York City judge who represented Thomas pro bono, eventually secured his release without bail. Soon thereafter, the district attorney declined to bring the case to trial due to lack of evidence. In addition, the DA vacated Thomas’s arrest record, expunging it from various crime databases.

The story might have ended there were it not for the fact that this seemingly wrongful arrest two years ago remains on the internet, which Thomas says has led him to be taunted at school and in the community.

Grunlund’s two news articles repeated the police claim that Thomas robbed a 52-year-old male of his iPhone and $10.

After Thomas’s arrest record was vacated and following repeated requests from him and his mother, the Staten Island Advance eventually removed the stories from its website, although the articles remain in some search engines, and links and brief descriptions can still be found on the paper’s Facebook page.



Both Grunlund and her editor, Gail Lubin, declined to comment.

“If the reporter knows that the police report she is relying on is a fabrication, the shield that normally protects reporters is penetrated,” Anthony Cook, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, told the Guardian.

But he added: “In order to anchor a collusion claim, you’d have to prove that there was an arrangement of some kind between the reporter and police department to deceive the public. That’s unlikely on the facts we have at this time.”

Of the three officers involved – Sgt Edward Leisengang, officer David Parisi and officer Allison Casanovas – two have been named in four misconduct lawsuits, two of which the city of New York has settled.

Leisengang, who the Thomas family alleges harassed them at their home after the charges against Malik were dropped, has been sued in federal court by at least three individuals in connection with misconduct.

Last September, the city of New York paid $125,000 to settle a lawsuit in which Leisengang and several other police officers were accused of planting a gun on a suspect and altering arrest paperwork. Leisengang was accused of signing off on a falsified police report.

Another civil suit against Leisengang alleges the sergeant falsified a police report in order to meet “productivity goals”, or arrest quotas.

Parisi, who wrote Thomas’s arrest report, has been sued once in federal court, an assault case the city settled for $50,000.

“Officer Parisi was among the officers who assaulted my client such that he was bleeding from his eyes and from open wounds on his forehead,” lawyer Amy Rameau told the Guardian. “I don’t mean to trivialize Mr Thomas’ case, but he’s lucky he wasn’t injured by Parisi and the NYPD.”

In 2017 alone, New York City paid $294.7m to settle allegations of improper police conduct and civil rights violations, according to the New York City comptroller.

The NYPD’s legal office and the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association did not respond to requests for comment.

A toxic mix of racism and bad incentives can lead police to tell falsehoods, a practice known colloquially as “testilying”, said Cynthia Conti-Cook of the Legal Aid Society.

“Police officers get credit for making arrests, but there are no consequences when cases fall apart,” Conti-Cook claimed. Under the current system, officers who want to become detectives “need to have a number of cases under their belts in order to advance”. In such a system, black teens become an easy target for ambitious cops, Conti-Cook said.

While many officers “are sacrificing their career goals in order to protect their integrity”, Conti-Cook said corrupt cops were tarnishing the force’s reputation and ruining the lives of those caught up in their dragnets.

The problem is compounded by the fact that these cops typically receive very little critical coverage from local crime beat reporters.

The police “benefit from a tacit partnership with the media who essentially justify the predatory behavior of police”, Professor Cook added.

“That leaves us in a situation where a black kid and his family are harassed by the police, and then the harassment continues by a local newspaper in the form of defaming the family and the child,” he said.

Thomas, meanwhile, says he is trying to move on despite the stigma of being branded a criminal in the town newspaper.

“I feel betrayed,” Thomas said. “The police are supposed to be protecting me, and the newspaper put us in danger. The comments under the article weren’t reassuring either.”