DOI’s investigation identified several deficiencies in the NYPD’s
response to the Floyd protests that undermined public confidence in the
NYPD’s discharge of its responsibility to protect the rights of citizens to
engage in lawful protest.
- The NYPD lacked a clearly defined strategy tailored to respond to
the large-scale protests of police and policing. NYPD officials
acknowledged that the size, multiplicity, and intensity of protests
across the City surprised them. They attributed any weakness in
the policing strategy to the initial deployment of insufficient
officers. This early under-deployment may have contributed to
problems that then escalated tensions even on ensuing days when
staffing was more appropriate. In addition, our investigation
revealed that NYPD’s primary strategy in at least the early days
of the Floyd protests appears to have involved defaulting to an
application of “disorder control” tactics and methods, without
adjustment to reflect the NYPD’s responsibility for facilitating
lawful First Amendment expression. These deployment
strategies, tactics, and shows of force exacerbated confrontations
between police and protesters, rather than de-escalating tensions.
- The NYPD’s use of force and certain crowd control tactics to
respond to the Floyd protests produced excessive enforcement that
contributed to heightened tensions. NYPD’s use of force on
protesters—encirclement (commonly called “kettling”), mass
arrests, baton and pepper spray use, and other tactics—reflected
a failure to calibrate an appropriate balance between valid public
safety or officer safety interests and the rights of protesters to
assemble and express their views. The inconsistent application of
the curfew similarly generated legitimate public concerns about
selective enforcement. NYPD use of force and crowd control
tactics often failed to discriminate between lawful, peaceful
protesters and unlawful actors, and contributed to the perception
that officers were exercising force in some cases beyond what was
necessary under the circumstances.
- Some policing decisions relied on intelligence without sufficient
consideration of context or proportionality. Though some of
NYPD’s intelligence gathering pertained to generalized threats
based on information from jurisdictions outside of New York City, the NYPD also collected specific intelligence that warranted
consideration in making policing judgments with respect to
particular protest events. However, intelligence alone does not
necessarily dictate a particular police response. In the case of the
Mott Haven protest, for example, where NYPD had specific
intelligence that may have warranted heightened concerns, its
mass arrest of protesters for curfew violations, in the absence of
evidence of actual violence, was disproportionate to the
circumstances.
- The NYPD deployed officers who lacked sufficient, or sufficiently
recent, training on policing protests. With the exception of officers
in specialized units, most officers responding to the protests had
not received recent relevant training for policing protests. After
the Floyd protests, the Police Commissioner directed all officers
to take additional training relating to policing protests. However,
the training remains heavily focused on disorder control methods,
without a sufficient community affairs or de-escalation
component.
- The NYPD lacked a centralized community affairs strategy for the
Floyd protests. The NYPD Community Affairs Bureau was not
part of the planning or strategy for policing the Floyd protests.
Though individual precinct-level Community Affairs officers were
present at certain protests, their deployment was at the
discretion of borough commanders, who also could use those
officers in a patrol or enforcement capacity.
- The NYPD lacked a sufficient data collection system to track
relevant protest data. The NYPD lacks a reliable, consistent
method to capture relevant protest data including the total
number of protest-related arrests. NYPD records reported
divergent arrest numbers due to their different sources and
collection methods.

Among other recommendations, the report suggests that the NYPD should deploy police with riot gear away from protesters and only use them if necessary, do a better job distinguishing between protests and riots, de-escalation training, communicate better with protesters, and have more transparency.


tldr, don't want to say I told you so... but... I told you so.