NY to use grand jury to investigate Prude death
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — New York’s attorney general on Saturday moved to form a grand jury to investigate the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died this past spring after Rochester police placed a hood over his head and held him down.
“The Prude family and the Rochester community have been through great pain and anguish,” Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement about Prude’s death, which has sparked nightly protests and calls for reform. She said the grand jury would be part of an “exhaustive investigation.”
Prude’s death after his brother called for help for his erratic behavior in March has roiled New York’s third-largest city since video of the encounter was made public this past week, with protesters demanding more accountability for how it happened and legislation to change how authorities handle mental health emergencies.
“This is just the beginning,” Ashley Gantt, a protest organizer, said by email after James’ announcement. “We will not be stopped in our quest for truth and justice.”
Hundreds of protesters gathered Saturday for a fourth night on the street where Prude, naked and handcuffed, was held face-down as snow fell. Policy body camera video shows officers covering Prude's head with a “spit hood,” designed to protect police from bodily fluids, then pressing his face into the pavement for two minutes.
Prude died a week later after he was taken off life support.
The Monroe County medical examiner listed the manner of death as homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.” Excited delirium and acute intoxication by phencyclidine, or PCP, were contributing factors, the report said.
A police internal affairs investigation has cleared the officers involved of any wrongdoing, concluding in April that their "actions and conduct displayed when dealing with Prude appear to be appropriate and consistent with their training.”
James' office opened its investigation the same month. Under New York law, deaths of unarmed people in police custody are often turned over to the attorney general’s office rather than handled by local officials.
Police union officials have said the officers were strictly following department training and protocols.
Mayor Lovely Warren, who is under pressure to resign over how long it took for Prude's death to become public, thanked James for taking the action in what she called “a trying time in Rochester.”
Protesters on Saturday continued to criticize Warren and Police Chief La’ron Singletary, walking and bicycling from the site of Prude's detention to City Hall, where they again called for them to step down.
Also Saturday, the attorney for several people struck by a car as they protested Prude’s death in New York City said police have opened a criminal investigation now that victims have come forward to file a police report. Sanford Rubenstein said two of those struck Thursday when the Ford Taurus drove through the crowd in Times Square have been interviewed by police and three others will meet with investigators next week.
Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, are planning an accelerated in-person travel schedule and the campaign is ramping up its on-the-ground activities as the 2020 race hurtles into its homestretch. Top Biden advisers detailed the new strategy in a conference call Friday and described the contest as fundamentally steady despite the volatility of the news environment.
In a wide-ranging briefing with members of the news media less than two months before Election Day, Biden’s team also expressed optimism about learning some voting outcomes on what many expect may be a chaotic election night.
Biden’s chief strategist, Mike Donilon, said that despite the onslaught from President Donald Trump and Republicans during their party convention last month, the campaign saw Biden entering the fall contest with his standing in the race largely unchanged, suggesting that the Republicans had not negatively defined him.
‘‘It was imperative for him to move the election at this period,’’ Donilon said of Trump. Pointing to pre- and post-convention polls that showed Biden leading, he continued: ‘‘That didn’t happen. So I think that speaks to the vice president’s strength and I think it speaks to kind of the stability in the race.’’
Even as he acknowledged that the race would be hard-fought, Donilon charged that Trump was not paying attention to ‘‘the central issue in this campaign’’ — the coronavirus pandemic and the challenges associated with it — and pledged that the Biden team would remain focused on it.
The campaign, Donilon said, continues to see the race as a referendum on Trump.
Certainly, some state-by-state surveys have shown a closer race compared with earlier in the summer, and the political environment continues to be extraordinarily unpredictable.
The campaign expects the contest to tighten in key swing states, acknowledged Jennifer O’malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, as she described the team’s efforts to chart multiple paths to the 270 electoral votes needed to win and nodded to growing efforts to expand on-the-ground campaigning.
Significant unknowns also remain, especially around what voting will look like amid a pandemic, and many Democrats in particular have expressed concern about voter suppression and Trump’s false claims about mail-in voting and fraud.
‘‘We’re very comfortable and confident that we will, as long as people are following the rules in each state and they cast their vote, that those votes will be counted,’’ O’malley Dillon said, noting that typically not ‘‘every single vote’’ is counted on election night. ‘‘There are big states that will be called on election night. And there will be a significant amount of the vote that will be called on election night. So at the end of the day, I think that for us, our job is to make sure we get the most votes.’’
She cited Arizona as one state with a