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Victor Dempsey describes the community-wide impact of gang raids and the database
3:28:14
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Victor Dempsey elaborates on the community-wide impact of gang raids and the database, emphasizing how entire families and neighborhoods are affected by these law enforcement actions.
- Dempsey describes attending post-raid debriefings and the disconnect between NYPD claims and community experiences
- He highlights how raids affect mothers, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers in the community
- Dempsey emphasizes that the victims are entire communities, not just individuals labeled as gang members
Victor Dempsey
3:28:14
Councilman, I just also wanted to add too you know earlier we heard some statement as far as speaking to the victims right.
3:28:22
Everyone you see sitting here, all the communities that we work with and out, they're all victims.
3:28:28
When we talk about you know they mentioned earlier around harms you know I know some other colleagues will speak to that a little bit later but the reason why bring it up is because you know in my former tenure, we used to go to what they had a debriefings after raids that will happen in all the developments throughout the city.
3:28:44
And we would get invitations from NYPD themselves and what will happen is we would go to these debriefings and the folks who are in attendance are the community members from these developments.
3:28:56
And they were supposed to be getting, I guess, a rundown of what what rage has happened in their community, you know, and these rage are happening militarized style, the wee hours of the morning, disrupting homes, right.
3:29:07
And the folks that were sitting there was asking NYPD questions like so what happened?
3:29:11
And NYPD would encourage them that they've taken the best of the I mean the worst of the worst out of their communities.
3:29:19
That's not what we saw in those debriefings.
3:29:21
In those debriefings was looking we're looking at the mothers of these young men and women.
3:29:25
We're looking at the sisters, the aunts, the grandmothers like like for real seriously.
3:29:30
And when we talk about victims, these are mothers who now are dealing with permanent exclusion letters from NYCHA because their loved one is on their lease who's been caught in a raid and they're part of their lease.
3:29:42
We're also looking at grandmothers who are so here legally and now their grandson is being put up for ICE or detention because of presumed guilt.
3:29:55
Not presumed innocence, presumed guilt.
3:29:57
So I really just wanna highlight too when we talk about the harms, yeah we can speak to the lawyers and everybody but the victims are the ones telling us this.
3:30:05
The victims are the entire communities.
3:30:07
The victims are the aunts or the neighbors who live on the same black, I mean, block asking their neighbors about what can we do to help.