Dozens of protesters rallied outside police headquarters in downtown Manhattan Thursday to urge NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban to buck the recommendation of an administrative judge that the officers involved in the shooting death of 32-year-old Kawaski Trawick face no discipline.
Trawick, a personal trainer and dancer with a history of mental health and substance use challenges, was shot and killed by officer Brendan Thompson while cooking in his Bronx apartment in April 2019.
Trawick’s parents and advocates have been calling for four years for Thompson and his partner, Herbert Davis, to be fired.
As THE CITY reported, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Administrative Trials Rosemarie Maldonado last week recommended no discipline for the officers, saying that whether the duo violated police procedures was moot because the Civilian Complaint Review Board had missed a statute of limitations for bringing charges against them.
The missed deadline meant the CCRB, an independent investigative body, had to prove the officers’ conduct constituted a crime — something Maldonado said the agency failed to do at an administrative trial held in the spring.
Her draft decision, which was obtained by THE CITY, failed to account for the fact that the NYPD caused the vast majority of the CCRB’s investigative delays by withholding body-cam footage of Trawick’s killing for over a year-and-a-half.
“To delay and delay and delay, and then say on a technicality, ‘You filed the motion too late. Sorry, you took too long, you passed the two-year statute of limitations’ — [there’s] zero credibility in this agency,” Brooklyn state Sen. Jabari Brisport said of the NYPD at the rally. “This is an abomination, and we need those two officers fired.”
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