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City Pays $27K After Cops Arrest Man For Trespassing As He Tried To Visit His Girlfriend's NYCHA Apartment
By
Nathan Tempey
Published Jul 27, 2015
Modified Jul 27, 2015
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By
Nathan Tempey
Published Jul 27, 2015
Modified Jul 27, 2015
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The city has agreed to pay $27,500 to the man police wrongfully arrested for trespassing as he went to visit his girlfriend in a public housing development in Washington Heights in 2014. The settlement, reported by the Post, ends the lawsuit Marcus Bussey filed over his February 15th trip through the system.
It all began when he went to meet his long-term girlfriend Denise Clark in her Polo Grounds Towers apartment. According to the lawsuit, after being buzzed in by a stranger, he found no one at home in her seventh-floor apartment, then called her and arranged to meet her in the lobby. In the stairwell, he encountered Officer Francisco Garcia, who through a cracked door said, "Come here!" Not seeing who had barked the order, Bussey ran back up the stairs to Clark's apartment, but hearing walkie talkies, he realized he was dealing with a cop. His lawyers say he then put his hands up and faced the wall to await Garcia's arrival.
When Garcia arrived, with Officer Elvis Cornea and five other cops in tow, Bussey explained he was visiting and that he would have stopped if Garcia had identified himself, but instead of looking into his assertions, the crew "forced him to the floor face-first" and punched, kicked, and clubbed him, his lawyer said. At the precinct, officers subjected Bussey to a body-cavity search, but refused to say what they had arrested him for, according to the suit.
Prosecutors dismissed trespassing and assault charges against Bussey nine months later, according to the Post. Now other friends of Clark's have stopped visiting her because of how often people are stopped and searched in the building. This process played out as the city was crawling toward the settlement to end a federal lawsuit by NYCHA residents and visitors claiming that the Police Department's program of stairwell patrols, ticketing residents for "lingering" in lobbies, halls, and stairwells, and arresting visitors for trespassing, together amounted to racial profiling on par with stop-and-frisk.
"The same practices that led to the class-action suit led to his arrest," Bussey's lawyer, Darrell Andrew Marshall told the Post. "You have to protect tenants from crime, but there has to be a balance, and in this case, there was no balance."
The class-action settlement, announced in April, ended five years of litigation. The city agreed to pay $270,000 total to the 17 named plaintiffs, to pay $3 million in attorney fees, and to acknowledge that someone simply existing in a common area of a NYCHA building is not enough justification for a police stop.
The city also pledged to revise the NYPD patrol guide and training protocol to "promote constitutional interactions," agreed to keep data on trespassing arrests, and agreed to subject its NYCHA policing to the same federal court monitoring as previously agreed to for stop-and-frisk.
Tagged
false arrest
federal lawsuit
nycha
nypd
police brutality
stop and frisk
trespassing
Nathan Tempey
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