An NYPD inspector has been tapped to become the department’s First Amendment protest supervisor — a newly created position mandated by a federal legal settlement forcing police to overhaul how they handle demonstrations, the Daily News has learned.
The settlement was reached last September after talks between the city, various lawyers and advocacy groups and state Attorney General Leticia James, who had sued the NYPD in 2021 accusing the nation’s largest police force of various abuses during the George Floyd protests that roiled the city the year before.
Before taking on the new position, NYPD Inspector Joseph Hayward spent the bulk of his 25-year career in Brooklyn and Queens and has been cited 15 times for excellent or meritorious police duty.
He was accused of using excessive force during a November 2011 confrontation between police and Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park.
Brent Schmidt said he was watching police clear the park when Hayward, captured in a Reuters photo pinning Schmidt to a fence with his left hand, struck him repeatedly with a baton. Schmidt sued and received a $15,000 settlement from the city.
Hayward started his new assignment as First Amendment protest supervisor, working under NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, on Sept. 3. A department spokesman said Hayward needs some time before granting an interview about his plans in the new role.
The legal settlement creating Hayward’s job calls for someone with the rank of deputy chief or higher to fill the role but it isn’t clear if Hayward will be promoted to get to that rank.
The spokesman did say in a statement, however, that the NYPD has “re-envisioned its policies for policing protests to deal with unique scenarios.”
“This will allow the NYPD to better calibrate its response based on specific conditions at each demonstration, ensuring it can enforce the law while protecting First Amendment rights,” the statement said. “In compliance with the settlement the NYPD has appointed a First Amendment executive to ensure the public remains safe and individual rights are protected.”
Wylie Stecklow, a civil rights lawyer specializing in police accountability, said meetings he was part of with the NYPD leading to the federal settlement were done in good faith.
But now, he said, comes the real test.
“My hopes are that this settlement agreement will serve as the underpinning of a new day in New York for First Amendment activity and that the police will honor it,” Stecklowe said. “And I hope they train their officers about First Amendment activity in a way that has been missing.”
May 30, 2020
The NYPD is fond of saying it has the ability to work its way into a protest, arrest someone causing trouble, such as by throwing bottles, and still allow those marching peacefully to carry on.
Stecklowe said that has not been his experience.
“I’ve been litigating these kinds of cases against the city of New York for 20 years,” he said. “The reason I’m able to sue them and get settlements is because they’re not handling protests properly. I think there’s been a failure in training that’s decades old.”
The Daily News reported last year that a never-released internal NYPD report painted a damning picture of how police handled the protests that started two days after Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, by police in Minneapolis. There were nearly 1,400 arrests, scores of allegations of police brutality, numerous instances of rioting and looting and more than 400 cops assaulted.
The report noted that no single police commander was calling the shots, officers lacked “timely intelligence” in the first days of the unrest, and there was a failure to utilize highly touted resources to better control the situation.
Molly Biklen, associate legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, said Hayward will have his hands full.
“He will have his work cut out for him in terms of developing a culture of facilitating free speech and minimizing arrests and uses of force in demonstrations,” she said. “That seems like the biggest issue. Can they go from taking a maximum aggressive position toward demonstrators and reporters to a different culture?”
The settlement mandates a more gradual response at protests rather than an immediate show of force and it prohibits the use of kettling, a process in which officers box in protesters and then move in to arrest everyone trapped inside the perimeter.
Hayward, according to the settlement, will oversee the development of all First Amendment policies and procedures as well as a training curriculum.
He is also charged with developing a “culture of facilitating free speech, deploying police only when necessary, and minimizing arrests
and uses of force in demonstrations.”
The city last year agreed to pay out about $21,500 to each of about 300 protesters arrested in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx after kettling prevented them from dispersing when an 8 p.m. curfew went into effect.
In a 2021 interview following his appointment as the commanding officer of the 71st Precinct in Crown Heights — replacing an inspector injured in a Floyd protest — Hayward said that while he was no fan of the defund the police movement he supported spending money on projects, such as building a new park, that “affect positive change.”
Records show that including the Schmidt cases the city has paid out $265,000 to settle four lawsuits in which Hayward was named.
He was also issued a command discipline for a January 2012 incident in East New York in which he lead a raid at a woman’s apartment following a call that someone there had a gun, according to Civilian Complaint Review Board records. The CCRB substantiated an abuse of authority allegation against Hayward, who was still a lieutenant at the time.
