Residents of New York City Housing Authority developments have told the Office of the Community Liaison that NYPD officers shine flashlights at people gathered outside their buildings, prompting some to leave despite no stop, search or arrest. The complaints appear in a new report from the office, which conveys residents’ experiences to the federal monitor overseeing court-ordered reforms.
The New York Daily News reports that the OCL’s account describes officers shining flashlights near residents socializing outside their buildings without necessarily stopping anyone or checking identification. The Daily News account, by reporter Rocco Parascandola, is the source for the report’s findings described here.
The Office of the Community Liaison, or OCL, says it has received flashlight-related complaints fairly consistently for about two years, from both older residents and young people. Its independent Community Liaison, Germain Thompson, said similar complaints have come from different parts of the city, according to the Daily News. The office says it documents patterns and relays them to the monitor and the court; it does not investigate individual allegations. The OCL’s website likewise says its role “does not include investigating allegations of misconduct by the NYPD.”
A September Encounter at Sumner Houses
The Daily News account describes one incident in the report: An OCL staffer said a 19-year-old resident reported that two uniformed officers approached his group one night in September at Sumner Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The staffer’s account says one officer shoved the teen without speaking, while two officers repeatedly waved lit flashlights at the group. No one was arrested or given a summons, the report notes.
Thompson said the complaint accounts were shared with his office in confidence. He told the Daily News that residents should be able to spend time outside their homes, asking, “Where do they expect us to hang out?” He also said that harassing groups without questioning or frisking them can damage trust between police and the community.
What NYPD Patrol Procedure Actually Says
NYPD Procedure 212-60, posted by the NYPD Monitor, says that merely lingering in a common area, without more, is not a criminal offense for which someone may be stopped or arrested. The procedure also directs officers patrolling NYCHA developments to treat residents with the courtesy, professionalism and respect to which they are entitled in their own homes.
A NYPD spokesperson told the Daily News that officers use flashlight beams when necessary to disperse crowds. Federal Monitor Mylan Denerstein was informed about the flashlight complaints and other issues raised in the report.
The Monitor's Broader Compliance Fight
The flashlight complaints are the latest entry in a long-running court oversight process that traces back to 2013, when Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactics violated minorities' constitutional rights. Peter Zimroth was tapped as the first federal monitor that year to oversee reforms; he died in 2021, three months before Denerstein was appointed to the post in January 2022.
The monitor’s job, according to the NYPD Monitor, is to regularly review the department’s progress in implementing court-required reforms. Those reviews have identified gaps. In February 2024, Denerstein called it “quite unsettling that the NYPD is not in compliance with the court-ordered reforms in these cases,” after a review of Neighborhood Safety Team stops found reasonable suspicion for only 76% of those examined. A separate Federal Monitor report in December 2021 examined trespass enforcement in and around NYCHA buildings.
What Earlier Monitor Reviews Covered
The December 2021 Federal Monitor analysis examined NYPD trespass enforcement from 2013 to 2019. It reported declines of almost 74% in criminal trespass arrests, 80% in trespass summonses and 96% in trespass stops, according to the Federal Monitor’s Fifteenth Report. Those figures track enforcement actions, not flashlight encounters. The 76% reasonable-suspicion finding cited above came from a different review: The Federal Monitor’s 2024 update says it reviewed a random sample of Neighborhood Safety Team stops from April to October 2022, examining stop reports and body-camera video. That review concerned those stops, not the NYCHA flashlight complaints.
The new flashlight report is the second of four quarterly reports the OCL plans to release this year. The office, whose Community Liaison role was created by the court in December 2022, organizes community meetings and listening sessions where residents can share their experiences directly with the monitor's team. Thompson told the City Council's Committee on Public Safety in December 2024 that the OCL had completed 262 citywide information sessions by the end of the third quarter of that year, and separately testified that residents had repeatedly raised concerns about officers only activating body-worn cameras when prompted by the public — a pattern that echoes the same complaint of inconsistent accountability now surfacing around flashlights.
