Artyom Matusov filed suit on November 19 in Manhattan federal court. He says the speaker of the council, Melissa Mark-Viverito, fired him back in September just a few days after he told journalists that New York City Police Chief Bill Bratton was low-balling numbers about how often police used excessive force.
“I said screw it, something needs to be done, and contacted my journalist friends and some council members and said [Commissioner Bill] Bratton had purposely misled the council,” said Matusov.
Matusov said Bratton presented misleading data about the percentage of arrests in which force was used in recent years. Matusov said the data made it look as if that percentage was falling, which was untrue.
In September, Bratton testified that “contrary to recent media coverage,” use of police force is declining steadily. He said force is used in fewer than two per cent of all arrests.
But Matusov, a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said those numbers don’t make sense. “In 2011, the NYPD reported about 40,000 arrests through the Stop and Frisk program,” he said on his Facebook page. “It’s now called Broken Windows again, but is the same thing, they just don’t fill out any paperwork, so we can’t count how many stops they do.”
But the NYPD hit back, saying Matusov had “grossly misinterpreted the statistics he used to determine that Police Commissioner Bratton has been caught in a lie before city council.”
In the lawsuit, filed by prominent civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel, Matusov said he went to the media as a “concerned citizen” and not as an employee of the city. Siegel said his client’s action was protected by the FIrst Amendment.
“I would hope that some of the people in the city council, some of the people in the mayor’s office, maybe some of the people at the police department, would rethink what they did to him,” said Siegel to The New York Post.
But New York’s city council is having none of it. “There is absolutely no merit to the claims. We are confident that we will prevail,” said a spokesperson.
