Sow, et al. v. City of New York, et al.

During the 2020 George Floyd protests in New Y ork City, the NYPD responded to demonstrations with widespread use of force. The National Lawyers Guild filed a class-action lawsuit against the City of New York, and in discovery the NYPD produced more than 6,000 video files. The footage became the evidentiary backbone for four categories of constitutional violations: baton strikes, pepper spray, excessive force, and kettling.

On the investigative team, my focus was kettling: a crowd-control tactic in which officers surround protesters and restrict movement, and one of the hardest to prove. The NYPD denied using it. I started with helicopter footage because it reduces the crowd to forms and makes police geometry legible. Two events had aerial coverage. Mott Haven in the Bronx and the Manhattan Bridge. I produced a graphic analysis showing NYPD formations enclosing protesters under white-shirt commanding officers. Ground-level footage corroborated it in real time, with protesters saying they couldn’t get out.

Four additional kettling events lacked aerial coverage, so I built the record from the ground up. I reviewed hundreds of discovery videos, geolocated key clips, and assembled detailed case files for each event. To establish temporal context, I synchronized footage into four-channel sequences so multiple angles of a single moment could be viewed simultaneously. To establish spatial context, I built a digital twin of the city and geolocated each clip within the built environment.

Together, these materials show how officers coordinated formations, used streets and barriers to their advantage, and systematically eliminated exit routes to confine and kettle protesters.

The NYPD settled out of court.