Every week in a conference room at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx, Kraig Lewis teaches about a dozen teenagers the six Rs for interacting with police: Don’t run, don’t resist, right to an attorney, refuse all searches, refuse food, and the right to remain silent.
“We’re here to enlighten them and teach them the right way to move in New York City,” said Lewis, an organizer with the Legal Aid Society who is running the sessions over the course of eight weeks. “Because one false move, they’ll end up in jail, or even worse.”
NYPD data crunched by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows that youths aged 15 to 17 were stopped by the NYPD at a higher rate than any other age group between 2003 and 2021. Once they were stopped, they were then frisked, arrested and assaulted by officers at the same rates as adults.
Such negative interactions prompted Legal Aid to team up with antiviolence organizations across the city to host Know Your Rights workshops to teach young people how to more safely deal with police officers. While Legal Aid has been running Know Your Rights workshops for nine years, the new program is intended to create “youth ambassadors” who can take the information they learn and share it with their peers.
Kraig Lewis’ pad with notes on what he teaches the teens at the Know Your Rights workshop.
Matt Katz / Gothamist
The workshops cover the NYPD’s gang database, and how it can ensnare innocent young people of color in the criminal justice system and subject them to surveillance. It addresses how and when to film police, and what to do when stopped and searched. And on the afternoon that Gothamist attended, kids at risk of incarceration who are part of the antiviolence group Guns Down, Life Up watched as Lewis pulled up videos on YouTube. He showed the teenagers a video of a police interaction in Iowa, in which a white officer stops and eventually arrests a Black man based on reports of a suspicious person. The man was handing out fliers for a political candidate.
The students found the situation familiar, and were shocked that police operate that way in Iowa. But the workshop organizers reminded them that aggressive policing can happen anywhere.
That prompted the kids, one after the next, to begin describing their own experiences with officers not turning on their body-worn cameras, or stopping them for no reason, or roughing them up.
One teenager, Daniel Calderon, described how he and his friends were once swarmed by NYPD officers after being falsely accused of stealing a moped. “They put us in handcuffs, they didn’t read us no rights, no [body-worn] cameras was on,” he said. Another time, officers rolled through an apartment building where he was hanging out in the staircase. “One or two just slapped my cousin — like, boom! Stop moving!” he said.
Young New Yorkers in neighborhoods with higher levels of street crime, like Mott Haven, are in regular contact with police officers. And a surge of NYPD officers in the subway system has led to a spike in arrests and summons for fare evasions, and could lead to more police interactions with young people underground. Just last week, a sobbing 12-year-old girl told the City Council that an officer at a Brooklyn subway station was so accusatory after she asked for help with her broken Metrocard that she feared for her life.
Legal Aid’s Kraig Lewis and Al Saint-Jean listen as Kanye Farrison Stone raps his own lyrics to get practice talking in front of other people.
Matt Katz / Gothamist
The NYPD didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment about the workshops and youth-police relations. But Alfred Titus, a retired NYPD homicide detective with a doctorate in criminal justice, said he thinks the NYPD should be doing its own version of Know Your Rights sessions.
“In these minority communities, the police are one of the biggest concerns for young people — even young people not involved in any criminal activity, just regular African American, Hispanic males and females, and their parents,” Titus said.
He agrees with the work Legal Aid is doing, so the public is better able to deal with officers who become too aggressive.
“There are officers that do not know how to take a step back and just calm down a situation,” he said. “They don’t use the de-escalation training that they are given. And instead they either add fuel to the fire or just don’t handle it correctly.”
And while that’s long been the reality of police-youth interactions in the city, he said, the difference now is because of cellphone videos, we see it more. Those videos go viral, and get on the news. Young people digest that as reality, even if the most violent incidents aren’t everyday occurrences.
Titus actually runs his own workshops through his consulting firm on how to have positive interactions with police. He said he tries to impart the perspectives of police officers, who often have their own fears when dealing with the public: “When an officer is walking up to a dark-tinted vehicle, and it’s night, and he can’t see who’s in the backseat, and your music is blasting, maybe there’s smoke ...This officer is now thinking, ‘OK, this might be my last hurrah right here. There may be someone who’s going to take me out.’”
At the session in Mott Haven, Lewis told teenagers that the responsibility for de-escalating police interactions is on them. Don’t argue, and don’t yell. And if you manage to keep it cool, you can preserve the right to sue the police if officers engage in misconduct, he said.
“That is the way to get back at these people because we cannot physically harm them,” Lewis said. “We tried to defund them. It didn’t work.”
Legal Aid’s Kraig Lewis calls on a student at the Know Your Rights class.
Matt Katz / Gothamist
Takeasha Newton, another organizer with Legal Aid, reminded the teenagers that police officers have the authority to kill people in some circumstances. So never run from the cops, she said. And “you should be giving this information to your family members and your community, because we want to save your life at the end of the day.”
At the end of class, the teenagers were asked to go to the front of the room and share a talent that they might have. The point was to get the kids to practice being in front of a crowd, so they’re best able to talk to groups of their peers about the rights they have and the risks they face when dealing with cops.
Lewis knows about cop interactions gone wrong. He was locked up after an infamous 2016 gang takedown in the Bronx that netted 120 arrests for supposed gang activity, but yielded very few convictions for actual violent crime. Lewis — a father who had no criminal record and was on the verge of graduating college in Connecticut — ended up spending almost two years in jail before copping to a marijuana charge to get released, even though he says he was innocent.
“Now I have to use what happened to me to try to help other people,” he said. “That’s my calling.”
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