Police on Long Island still using force against Black people at disproportionate rates, 5 years after NYS reform plans

The motorcycle had just started when police pulled up.

Marc Merritt was on Grand Avenue in Baldwin in April 2023, helping a friend bump-start a stalled bike outside the now-shuttered Appleton Estate lounge, when Nassau police officers demanded identification, he said.

Merritt, who is Black, declined, saying he had done nothing wrong. Body camera footage obtained by Newsday shows officers herding him onto the sidewalk and against a building, yelling for his ID.

When Merritt finally reached into his pocket for his driver’s license, an officer fired his Taser. He collapsed to the ground, yelling in pain. He was arrested on charges including disorderly conduct and jaywalking.

Merritt said he believes race drove the encounter.

"It’s not an opinion at this point — it’s truth," said Merritt, who received $75,000 this year from Nassau County to settle his lawsuit over the incident.

What happened to Merritt is not an outlier. Five years after New York ordered every police department to rethink how and against whom officers use force, police across the state are using more force — and against Black residents at sharply disproportionate rates — according to a Newsday analysis of more than 30,000 incidents.

After the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, states across the country sought to overhaul their use-of-force policies. In New York, an executive order by then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said "urgent and immediate action is needed" to reduce force and eliminate long-standing racial disparities in policing.

On those counts, the state’s efforts have so far failed, the investigation found.

Police across New York State used force against 42% more people in 2024 than in 2021, up to 11,871 people from 8,361, an analysis of state data shows.

Black New Yorkers are still subject to police force at rates much higher than other groups, relative to population.

Watch: Man Tasered after ID request

Out of 972 people subject to serious force by Nassau police between 2021 and 2024, 48% were Black, the analysis found. Nassau’s population is only 11% Black, according to 2023 American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Suffolk police used significant force against 918 people in that time, 40% of whom were Black in a county that’s 7% Black.

Put another way, Black people in Nassau and Suffolk were nearly 11 times as likely to experience police force as white people between 2021 and 2024, relative to population, Newsday’s analysis shows. Those figures are nearly double the statewide rate, where police use force against Black people 5.5 times as often as they do against white people.

These findings show that the transformative progress in policing sought by Cuomo’s executive order remains, five years later, as elusive as ever.

"If you don’t change your training and you don’t change policies, then you’re going to continue to get the same outcome," said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum.

Both Nassau and Suffolk police departments reported fewer force incidents in 2024 than 2023, along with decreases in reported crimes.

Policing experts and advocates say these findings suggest that efforts to reduce force and address racial disparities in policing will require more than what was called for in New York’s executive order.

In recent years, several other states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, have implemented use-of-force changes more robust than New York’s.

"The reality is that police training hasn’t fundamentally changed in 25 years," Wexler said. "If you simply pass legislation and hope you’re going to get different results, I think that’s naive."

Suffolk Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina told Newsday that comparing 2021 use-of-force data with 2024 isn’t apples-to-apples because of the impact the pandemic had on police interactions.

"Using 2021 as a baseline for police statistics is not representative because COVID-19 significantly altered crime patterns, mobility, reporting practices, and police deployment," Catalina, who took over as commissioner in February, said in a statement.

When there are fewer police interactions with the public, there will be fewer arrests and use-of-force incidents. But Newsday’s analysis of the data accounted for the reduction in police interactions by comparing the increase in police force with the increase in arrests. The increase in force since 2021 outpaces the increase in arrests over that time in Nassau and is in line with the increase in Suffolk.

Catalina added that comparing police activity with population isn’t ideal "because it only measures who lives in a jurisdiction, not who our officers actually interact with."

"Police officers respond where crime, calls for service, and traffic violations occur, rather than policing at random," he wrote in an email. "This means that ‘exposure’ to police varies widely across race, age, gender, geography, and time of day."

Lou Civello, president of the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association, echoed Catalina's criticism of Newsday's analysis.

"It mistakes correlation for causation," Civello said. "You have to take into account any number of socioeconomic factors. Who is committing the crimes? How often are they using violence?

"We should take a hard look at this," Civello said of racial disparities in police use of force. "And if there’s correlation, we should look at it. But we should not assume racial bias."

Nassau County Police Department officials declined to comment for this story.

Tommy Shevlin, president of Nassau's Police Benevolent Association, didn’t directly address Newsday’s findings, but said in a statement, “We do not respond to 911 calls based on race nor ethnicity. We respond to help people regardless of their background. We respond to where the calls for help are and where the crime is occurring.”

Limitations in state data

Newsday analyzed more than 30,000 use-of-force incidents from 358 police departments across New York State over the last four years — from the Independence Town Police Department in Allegany County, which has just two sworn officers, to Long Island’s county departments, each with about 2,500 sworn officers.

Since 2019, police have been required to report use-of-force incidents to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, which posts the raw data from the previous year online each summer. Those requirements aren’t related to Cuomo’s 2020 executive order.

But the state data has multiple limitations. While DCJS has use-of-force data going back to 2019, the agency changed how it collects the information in late 2020, making it impossible to fairly compare any data from before 2021.

Police departments must report use-of-force incidents in which police either display or use their guns, Tasers, pepper spray or other devices. Incidents involving physical force alone — an officer putting their hands on someone — are only reported if they cause serious injury or involve a chokehold, though data analyzed by Newsday shows that is rarely reported.

Less than 0.5% of force used between late 2020 and 2024 was reported as physical force, including chokeholds, meaning those incidents have gone unanalyzed.

Frederick K. Brewington, a Hempstead civil rights attorney who represents plaintiffs in police abuse cases and was involved in discussions around Nassau’s reform plan, said he’s seen little positive change in the way police use force on Long Island since the executive order.

"If anything, I’m seeing a higher level of escalation," Brewington said. "This is a serious Nassau-Suffolk problem, but this is an America problem. We haven’t answered these questions as a society."

Beyond the larger disparities in police force used against Black people, compared with white people, Newsday's analysis found Hispanic people of any race were three times as likely to experience force by Nassau police as white people, relative to population. Suffolk police were nearly twice as likely to use force against Hispanic people as against white people. 

Asian people, statewide and in Nassau and Suffolk, experienced police force at rates roughly equal to or lower than white people, relative to population.

Catalina defended his department: "My objective is to ensure that all enforcement is free from bias and that each incident is evaluated with the information necessary to take good-faith, constitutionally compliant law enforcement action."

Newsday requested interviews with the police commissioners in both Nassau and Suffolk to discuss use-of-force data on multiple occasions. Neither department granted an interview. 

‘Do not get that opportunity’

If Merritt’s case shows how quickly a minor street encounter can turn violent, what happened to the Whyte family in Coram only a month later illustrates how sweeping — and how destructive — police force can become when a department mobilizes.

As Warren Whyte finished up yardwork outside his Coram home in May 2023, more than a dozen Suffolk police officers amassed nearby. Several eyed him through the woods, guns drawn.

An officer carrying a long gun sprinted up to the curb in front of Whyte’s house, body camera footage obtained by Newsday shows. A sprinkler swiveled over the freshly mowed grass.

"Get the [expletive] down on the ground!" the officer screamed at Whyte, gun raised, during the frantic search for the man who had just shot an officer on the next street over.

Whyte, who was not that man, dropped to the ground, facedown, and put his hands behind his back, he told Newsday as he recounted the incident.

"Where’s the gun? Where’s the gun?" the police demanded, Whyte recalled. Another officer ran up and drove his knee into Whyte’s shoulder as he was being handcuffed.

The actual suspect, as police radio transmissions had revealed, was described as a Black male with a completely different build and clothing, who had barricaded himself in a house half a mile away.

"That’s not the right guy?" asked an officer close to Whyte, before anyone knew who Whyte was. 

At least one other officer on the scene was recorded on a body camera saying Whyte didn’t fit the description of the man suspected of shooting an officer — other than having the same skin color. Still, police held Whyte in the back of a police car.

Now, officers wanted to search his house, Whyte said.

Watch: Wrong person forcibly detained

He initially told the police they’d have to get a warrant, but he relented under their persistence, with one condition. Officers had to let his son, his wife and her grandmother leave the house before they could enter.

In a lawsuit filed in November 2023, Whyte says at least 30 members of the Suffolk police SWAT Team then effectively ransacked his house.

"When I came to my bedroom, everything was on the ground," Whyte told Newsday. "Our bed was upside down. My wife’s underwear drawer was open."

New bedroom furniture Whyte and his wife had recently bought for their 11-year-old daughter was broken into pieces, Whyte said.

While this was going on inside the house, out front, Whyte’s wife’s 83-year-old grandmother, who is diabetic, asked if she could leave the police car to use the restroom. Officers refused and the woman was left no choice but to urinate on herself, according to the lawsuit.

In another police car, Whyte heard over the police radio that officers had the actual suspect in custody, he alleges in the lawsuit. It was at this point officers released the Whytes from custody and began apologizing, he said.

Whyte sued Suffolk County, alleging that damage was done to his house, physically, and done to him and his family, psychologically.

In court filings, Suffolk has denied the allegations. The case is ongoing.

Whyte said he’d never had trouble from Suffolk police before, but added this incident made him feel they might be beyond fixing.

"When it comes to police reform, no. When you look at how white people are treated compared to Black people," he said. "White people are given the opportunity to walk away; they’re given the opportunity to state their side of the story. Black people do not get that opportunity. If you are Black, you are a criminal."

'No meaningful reform'

When Cuomo issued Executive Order 203 in June 2020, the goals were clear.

George Floyd had been killed just weeks earlier, when a police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes despite Floyd pleading, "I can’t breathe."

While the law allows police officers to use force against people when they feel their safety or the public’s is threatened, Floyd’s murder and the intensity of the subsequent protests raised major questions about how police have historically administered force.

Cuomo’s order required law enforcement agencies to review their use-of-force policies and procedures and develop plans to improve them, specifically crafted "to address any racial bias and disproportionate policing of communities of color."

New York’s roughly 450 municipal police departments were to solicit feedback from residents, advocacy groups, religious organizations and others for the reform plans before submitting them to local governments for approval, which had to be granted no later than April 1, 2021.

Advocacy groups on Long Island initially viewed the executive order as a rare opportunity to change the way police interact with the communities they’re meant to serve.

Emily Kaufman, a steering committee member of Long Island United to Transform Policing and Community Safety, said there were positive signs early in the process.

"At the time we were incredibly hopeful about the conversations that were happening," Kaufman said. "In Nassau County, we were invited into the conversations. In Suffolk County we sat in on all the listening sessions. There were hundreds of people coming out and sharing their experiences.

"It felt like a really good faith effort to move the needle, particularly in Suffolk County."

But the advocates say they became disappointed. As the reform plans began to take shape, especially in Nassau, they complained that their input was not taken seriously and not ultimately reflected in the plans passed by the Nassau and Suffolk legislatures.

"There was no meaningful reform that would address use of force in their plans," Kaufman said of Nassau and Suffolk. "There was no intention to address this."

The state was not required to review the reform plans for substance or compliance. No one interviewed by Newsday was aware of a single police department across the state that lost funds under Executive Order 203, the only penalty considered by the order.

The result, advocates say, was a reform process with no enforcement mechanism at all.

"Nobody ever said anyone was going to read the plans, nobody ever said anyone was going to evaluate the plans or follow up on the plans," Susan Gottehrer, director of the Nassau chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said. "They merely had to submit the plans. That’s it."

As a result of their reform plans, both Nassau and Suffolk police departments, however, now publicly post data on arrests, crimes and other metrics. Suffolk also tasked its Human Rights Commission with review and oversight of police misconduct investigations.

But, police reform advocates say one of the reasons racial disparities in policing haven’t improved across New York is that state lawmakers did not pass additional reform measures in 2020, as several other states have done.

While DCJS does compile an annual report of these serious use-of-force incidents that includes information about the incident, as well as demographic information about involved officers and subjects, no police officers are named in these reports. The state attorney general typically does not investigate individual use-of-force incidents unless someone is killed.

Several of New York’s neighbors require use-of-force reporting that goes beyond what New York asks of its police.

New Jersey in 2019 began requiring police departments to report any critical police use-of-force incident to the attorney general’s office, which is then published online. Connecticut, Maine and Rhode Island all require police to report serious uses of force to either the attorney general or an inspector general, who then investigates those incidents. In nearly all the cases that are reported to the attorneys general of these states, the officers involved in the incidents are named.

"It really stands out that New York hasn’t done any of that," said Josh Parker, deputy director of policy at New York University School of Law's Policing Project.

"The vacuum at the state level is creating an opportunity for use of force and especially use-of-force incidents against Black people to balloon."