Demonstrators stage a sit-in at the site where Daniel Prude was arrested after marching from a community gathering on Sept. 3, 2020 in Rochester, N.Y.Michael M Santiago/GettyImages/Getty Images
Seven Rochester police officers were suspended on Thursday in the suffocation of a Black man as he was being detained in March, although the mayor and senior state officials face escalating questions about why more than five months passed before action was taken.
The man, Daniel Prude, who suffered from mental illness, was handcuffed by officers on March 23 after he ran into the street naked in the middle of the cold night and told at least one passerby that he had the coronavirus. Mr. Prude began spitting, and the officers responded by pulling a mesh hood over his head.
When he tried to rise, the officers forced Mr Prude to the ground, face down with one of them pushing his head to the pavement, the video footage showed. Mr. Prude was held down by the police for two minutes and had to be resuscitated. He died a week later at the hospital.
His death did not receive widespread attention until Wednesday, when his family released raw police videos of the encounter, which they had obtained through an open records request. The scene – a Black man, handcuffed and sitting in a street, wearing nothing but a white hood – seemed a shocking combination of physical helplessness and racist imagery from another era.
The suspension of the seven officers was the first disciplinary action in response to Mr. Prude’s death. In a news conference Thursday afternoon, Mayor Lovely Warren apologized to the Prude family, saying that Mr. Prude had been failed “by our police department, our mental-health care system, our society. And he was failed by me.”
On Wednesday, state Attorney-General Letitia James made her first statement on the case, offering condolences to Mr. Prude’s family and promising “a fair and independent investigation.”
“We will work tirelessly to provide the transparency and accountability that all our communities deserve,” she said.
Investigations into police-related killings of unarmed civilians in New York are overseen by Ms. James’s office, and findings of fact are not publicized until complete. In Mr. Prude’s case, the investigation began in April, and is continuing.
With the release of the camera footage, Joe Prude’s assessment of that night in March was filled with outrage. “I placed a phone call to get my brother help,” he told reporters on Wednesday, “not to have my brother lynched.”
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