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Queens Cop Gets $15M Payout For Off-Duty Beatdown By Fellow Officers

Nathan Tempey

Published Feb 4, 2016

Modified Feb 4, 2016

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Nathan Tempey

Published Feb 4, 2016

Modified Feb 4, 2016

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An African-American NYPD cop who sued the city over his 2010 beating and false arrest by a crowd of other officers at his Queens home was awarded $15.1 million in damages yesterday.

"I feel vindicated," Larry Jackson told the Daily News after the verdict. "Just like they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Jackson was off-duty at around 1:40 a.m., winding down a barbecue for his daughter's birthday, when he said a man broke a bottle in the street in front of his house. He and his girlfriend confronted the man and told him they didn't "want any trouble." Then Jackson realized that he he had a gun tucked in his waistband, according to the lawsuit, and a crowd of 15-20 strange men appeared on the block, some armed with sticks and bats. His girlfriend, Charlene Strong, ran inside and called 911, while Jackson talked the group into leaving.

The first two cops who responded from Jamaica's 113th Precinct arrived after the crowd had cleared out, and allegedly ignored Strong and Jackson's statements that Jackson was a fellow officer. The sounds of a fight inside Jackson's house prompted one cop, John Czulada, to run inside, and when Jackson followed, he says the cop told him to "back the fuck up."

Jackson's plea, "Dude, it's my house, and I'm a police officer too," was met with a baton to the throat by Czulada.

From there, a crowd of as many as 70 officers convened on the house as a growing number of cops took shots at Jackson with batons and fists, one placed him in a chokehold, others arrested three partygoers, and finally, officers piled onto him in the street, ignoring his complaint that he was having trouble breathing, and pepper-spraying him. At one point in the melee, Jackson says he and the officer who choked him fell on top of his 82-year-old grandmother.

"Yeah, you motherfucking dirtbag," Czulada purportedly said as Jackson lay handcuffed. "If you are really a cop, where's your ID?"

When an officer fished out the ID from Jackson's pocket, officers scattered, according to the suit. Jackson was still arrested, ultimately held in custody for 20 hours, and treated for a fractured hand, before being freed without charges. He says that throughout the police riot at his house, no supervising officers intervened, and that despite initial interviews with the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau and Queens district attorneys, no investigators ever followed up and no cop involved was disciplined. Jackson remains on the force. A version of his lawsuit filed in 2013 stated that his right hand is still stiff from being broken, and that he would likely never be able to return to full duty, but he has since regained that status, according to his lawyer.

At trial, police denied hitting Jackson with batons or handcuffing him, and said he never identified himself as a cop. Czulada said he punched Jackson, 6-foot-3 and 300 pounds, in the face because he felt threatened by him, according to the Daily News.

Of the 13 officers named in the suit, jurors found 4 cops directly involved in beating him, and 3 in falsely arresting him, but agreed that 8 were liable for failing to stop the beatdown, and that 12 were liable for damages.

In the lawsuit, Jackson's lawyers claimed that the botched response, which allowed the gunman to go free, was the result of the city's "long history of discriminating against its African-American male police officers" and its 2008 elimination of "Confrontational Situations" training. Several of the responding officers, including Czulada and the other initial responder, were white men, according to the suit. The lack of subsequent accountability showed "an outrageous and systematic pattern of civil rights violations, oppression, bad faith and cover-up," the lawyers wrote.

"They would treat a dog better than they treated Jackson," Jackson's lawyer and former cop Eric Sanders told the New York Times. "I’ve never seen anything like this and I’ve been around law enforcement a long time. It's disgraceful what they did."

City lawyers argued that Jackson was drunk and resisted arrest, and should consider himself lucky the NYPD didn't pursue charges. Jurors rejected those claims.

"I think sometimes the cops treat everybody like perpetrators," juror Joni Marcinek told the News.

The city's Law Department called the damages "exorbitant" and told reporters that it could yet challenge the outcome, and that the verdict is not final.

Tagged

113th precinct

barbecue

birthday party

damages

larry jackson

nypd

police brutality

police misconduct

police racism

Nathan Tempey

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