Protesters in Elmont demand changes in police policies

“This march is for you,” Markeena Novembre told Elmont Memorial High School students last Sunday night, as she led nearly 30 Black Lives Matter protesters down Elmont Road for the inaugural Breaking the Cycle’s New York chapter event.

Novembre, a 2014 graduate of Elmont High, founded the organization in January 2016 at Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, to help Black children succeed and give Black communities a voice. It has since expanded to include several statewide chapters, with some at a number of historically Black colleges and universities, and now that she has graduated from Clark Atlanta University and returned to New York, she decided it was time to form a chapter here.

“It’s about time that we make noise for Black lives,” said Novembre, noting that Elmont is a predominantly Black community.

The inaugural event was originally designed to honor Black women, she said, but after a Kenosha, Wis., police officer shot 29-year-old Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back seven times and left him paralyzed from the waist down, Novembre decided to turn it into a “Stop Killing Us March” for all the Black victims of police brutality.

She organized it with Allan James Feliz’s family, which is demanding answers in his police-involved killing on Oct. 17, 2019. New York Police Department officers pulled Feliz over for not wearing a seatbelt, they reported, and quickly learned he had three open warrants. The officers asked him to get out of his car, which he did, but then he jumped back in and tried to drive away. One of the officers, Edward Barrett, reached into the car in an attempt to take control of the vehicle, body camera footage shows, and Sgt. Jonathan Rivera fired a Taser at Feliz through the passenger’s-side window, dived into the car over another passenger, and wrestled Feliz while warning him repeatedly to stand down.

In the footage, Rivera could be heard saying, “Yo bro — I’m going to have to shoot you” before firing his service weapon at Feliz. Feliz was rushed to Montefiore Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. He left behind a 6-month-old son.

The family has since filed a $350 million lawsuit against city officials and the New York Police Department for an alleged pattern of racial profiling and excessive force. It also claims that Feliz was not trying to drive away from the officers, but rather, when he returned to the car, it shifted forward.

The Felizes also set up an online petition demanding justice for Allan, and started an email campaign to New York State Attorney General Leticia James asking for the police to be indicted. The attorney general had previously announced she would investigate the incident, and Sammy Feliz, Allan’s brother, said his family was supposed to have received a resolution on the case in February, but has not been updated about it in months.

Sunday’s protest also came one week after a similar demonstration, in which Black Lives Matter activists drove from the Chase Bank on Linden Boulevard to the intersection of 217th Street and Linden Boulevard in Cambria Heights, Queens, where 19-year-old Matthew Felix was fatally shot by Nassau County police officers on Feb. 25.

According to the police, Felix had met with a man who was selling his vehicle in Garden City Park, when he pulled out a gun and aimed it at the seller’s head. He then allegedly fled in the stolen vehicle, with detectives from the Bureau of Special Operations following him to his home in Cambria Heights, crossing jurisdictional lines. They then waited for Felix outside his house, and when Felix left in his vehicle, police said, they tried to pull him over. But that is when shots rang out, and Felix was fatally injured.

In response to these and similar incidents, Nassau County Legislator Carrié Solages, a Democrat from Valley Stream, is renewing his calls for body cameras. He and Legislator Siela Bynoe, a Democrat from Westbury, had previously sent letters to County Executive Laura Curran in June saying that any collective bargaining agreements with police unions should include a renewed discussion of the body camera program.

Since then, Solages wrote that he has had several “positive conversations with the administration and the Police Department regarding body cameras,” but he has not heard about any plans for them, and he believes they may be held up because of cost concerns.

“Given the growing number of incidents around the country, and the call for change, it is my belief that body cameras for our Nassau County police officers must be a top priority,” Solages wrote in the Aug. 28 letter, in which he compared the “bad checks” that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about in his “I Have a Dream” speech 57 years ago to the police brutality the Black community continues to face. “I cannot in good conscience consider any borrowing requests for any purpose until we arrive at a satisfactory resolution on the body camera issue,” Solages said.

“This is a public safety concern,” he said, and if the program were implemented properly, it could help protect Nassau’s police against allegations of police brutality.

“This is just as important as refinancing debt,” Solages said, but the fact that the program has not been implemented since former county executive Ed Mangano and former police commissioner Thomas Krumpter proposed purchasing body cameras for 31 officers who patrolled predominantly minority areas like Elmont in 2015, shows that it is not one of the county’s top priorities. Members of the Nassau Police Benevolent Association and the Superior Officers Association filed a complaint with the state Employment Relations Board at the time, saying county officials excluded the police unions in its discussions of the program, and it never moved forward.

If the county were to reallocate its funds, however, Solages said, implementing the program could be possible.

But some protesters said more change would be needed. At Sunday’s protest, Elmont resident Christine Rivera said Americans need to expand the conversation of reparations beyond payments to Black people, and should instead include psychological counseling and infrastructure repairs as well, and Michael Outlaw, the vice president of the radio station at St. John’s University, said he would like to see psychiatrists at all precincts, more prominent background checks, fewer police officers and more trainings for officers.

Additionally, Feliz noted, body cameras did not help stop the police in his brother’s shooting. “These measures aren’t working,” he said. “It’s that shoot-to-kill mentality that we have to eliminate, and once we eliminate that mentality, our communities will be a lot safer” and “this country could be a lot better.”