After spending the night in a Brooklyn jail, a nurse escorted Jason Salters out past the dumpsters near the building, he says. He had not been charged with any crime, and no one apologized for his arrest. His head and torso were still throbbing from the events of the previous day.
“No sorry, no MetroCard. February, no coat,” Salters said, recalling the journey back to his apartment in the Bronx that winter morning with only the clothes on his back and the trauma of his encounter with the criminal legal system.
Around seven in the morning on February 5, 2024, New York Police Department (NYPD) officers had arrived at the men’s shelter where Salters worked as a shift supervisor. Following shelter protocol, Salters asked to see a warrant before he would allow them entry to look for a suspect in the room where the residents were sleeping. The police didn’t have a warrant, but they had another document called an “investigative card.” Salters phoned his supervisor for guidance on how he should proceed, and was advised not to let them in if they didn’t show a warrant.
Meanwhile, one of the officers had made his way into the building through a separate entrance. He met up with Jason Salters in a narrow hallway, where Salters had been speaking to the other three cops from behind a large metal door. The cop who’d snuck in threatened to tase Salters if he did not back away from the door so that his colleagues could enter the premises.
When Salters immediately stepped away from the door—not wanting to be tased—the three officers rushed in and began to attack him with a flurry of punches and kicks.
“Now I’m on the ground, and all I was doing was my job,” Salters later said. “I’m confused, I’m scared. I don’t know where this is gonna go with NYPD.”
Video footage from the shelter’s security cameras showed everything, from the time Salters stood talking with the officers through the door to when they beat him up and handcuffed him while he was face down on the floor. The footage swept TV screens and the Internet in September 2024 when CBS News picked up the story.
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The paper trail Salters keeps in his records tells a different story.
Months later, with the spotlight turned off, Salters’s case against the police officers who brutalized him came to a standstill. The district attorney’s office declined to press charges against the NYPD, stating they had found no evidence of a crime in the officers’ actions.
Officers did in fact draft arrest documents for him that day, writing that he was arrested for “Resisting Arrest” and “Obstructing Govt. Administration,” both listed as misdemeanors, and “Disorderly Conduct,” coded as “V” for a minor violation (on par with a traffic infraction). They took him to Interfaith Hospital, where the reason for his visit was listed on a medical report as “headache and assault victim.” Hospital staff documented a diagnosis of “traumatic injury of the head,” and attached photos were captioned with details such as “laceration to left side head, complaint of pain in left eye, lip pain.”
The NYPD hospital report referred to Salters as the “Defendant,” though he was, in fact, the victim of an assault. He was taken straight from the hospital to a jail, where he was incarcerated for a day. When he got out, there were no charges filed against him. The cops’ accusations of resisting arrest and obstructing government activity were never legitimized. They had pulled off a heinous attack on his personhood and dignity.
Salters filed a complaint of police misconduct with the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). As soon as he did, he felt that cops in the precinct where he lived began to harass him, leaving him with the sense that the officers were connected—that although the incident happened at his workplace in Brooklyn, officers in his Bronx neighborhood were aware of his CCRB complaint and were feeling vengeful. One of the officers who pummeled him on the day of the incident even started calling his cellphone. (He took a screenshot of the Caller ID, which matched the name of an officer cited in his CCRB case.)
The intimidation tactics affected Salters so much that he moved out of his apartment.
“I’m originally from Virginia, where, when we were kids, we were taught that police were safe,” Salters said. “I will never tell none of my nieces, nephews, sons, daughter, none of that now.”
His life changed as a result of the incident. He suffered four slipped discs in his back, which “seizes up” occasionally, and had to receive an epidural in his neck for pain management. He sees a therapist once a week, and has not returned to his job at the shelter. Workers’ compensation payments and the hope of bringing the officers to justice keep him going.
Salters called the Office of the Brooklyn District Attorney in late January 2025, hoping to get an update on his police misconduct case that had been opened there several months prior. He spoke with assistant district attorney Chris Eribo. “Based on the evidence that we have, my office concluded that they will not prosecute the officers involved for that incident,” Eribo says in an audio recording that Salters made of the call. In response, Salters becomes emotional, insisting that if a regular person had attacked him, it would have been considered assault and the person would have been prosecuted accordingly. But since the culprits caught on tape were officers, they would never be held accountable for their actions. Eribo states that there is simply nothing more that he could do; there was insufficient evidence to support an assault charge against officers. The case was closed.
When police engage in acts of violence against civilians, an outcome of prosecution or discipline is indeed rare, even in cases where the civilian is killed. The grieving family of a Bronx father, Allan Feliz, is still hoping for the cop who fatally shot him to be fired—and has been calling for justice since 2019. In February 2025, an administrative judge upheld a CCRB ruling that the officer should be fired, but the only authority who can enforce such a disciplinary recommendation is New York’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. In February and March 2025, Samy Feliz (Allan Feliz’s brother) and activists from the Justice Committee hosted rallies in front of NYPD headquarters calling for Tisch to make a decision to fire the officer by March 31. On March 11, Tisch told New York City Council that she was taking tougher measures against cops who violate rules, moving away from the typical approach of training as a form of discipline for repeat offenders. She did not specify what the tougher measures were, but the City, a nonprofit newsroom, reported that the intention to be firmer deviates from the pattern of previous commissioners, who have routinely softened the blow for misbehaving cops or thrown out the cases entirely. Tisch never specifically responded to the deadline from the Justice Committee and has taken no known action against the officer who killed Feliz.
A robust infrastructure of laws, policies, top officials, and police unions work together to insulate officers who face accusations of misconduct from community members. Research suggests that police tend to engage in more combative interactions with Black and Latino people, with disproportionately higher rates of criminalization for these groups. One in five Black adults say they have been subjected to police violence, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll (the number is slightly higher for Black men specifically).
A recent report from the Data Collaborative for Justice showed widening disparities in the way that police issue criminal summonses in New York, with 85 percent going to Black and Hispanic individuals collectively, despite these groups making up 52 percent of the city’s population. Less than 10 percent of summonses lead to convictions, meaning that droves of people are forced to undergo court processes without being found guilty of a crime. The study’s authors explain that the targeted issuing of summonses has a “process is punishment” effect, where being at the mercy of the criminal legal system often translates to lost time and income for the defendant, not to mention the psychological distress of criminalization.
Salters’s incident can be viewed through this lens. Officers subjected him to a beating as well as arrest, forced transportation to a hospital and jail, and an overnight lockup. The physical assault was only the beginning of the harm the officers inflicted. They also made a unified decision to punish Salters with detainment and with bogus charges to satisfy the paperwork requirement and justify their actions. It was an episode of brutality, deception, and abuse of power by authorities who assumed—correctly, it now appears—that the state would absolve them.
How many other Black and Latino people have experienced similar abuses of power? How many more will? The cases are underreported and under-researched, with little to no accountability for offending officers and a lack of media visibility.
Victims who die at the hands of law enforcement are more likely to capture social attention, even if for a moment, and generate news coverage. Particularly when video evidence is released, officers can be arrested and charged (though rarely convicted). On the other hand, a survivor of police brutality has little to no recourse. As Salters’s case illustrates, even video evidence of assault and unlawful detainment, with moderate media coverage, is no match for an ironclad system designed to prioritize impunity over accountability for unjust policing.
The district attorney’s office investigated Salters’s case and concluded that there was insufficient evidence that the cops had done anything wrong. In contrast, the Civilian Complaint Review Board substantiated Salters’s “force” claims against three of the officers and recommended disciplinary action again four officers, according to a letter Salters received from them on May 21. Nevertheless, the power to enforce penalties or dismiss the CCRB’s recommendations lies squarely in the hands of the police commissioner. If she did decide to enforce discipline—which usually takes the form of mandatory training or a few docked vacation days—it would pale in comparison to the harsh carceral punishments reserved for civilians found guilty of similar violent actions.
Survivors of police violence and arrest, such as Salters, have been exposed to the dark underbelly of an institution so often celebrated in the United States. They nurse the wounds of physical and emotional trauma at the hands of authorities they were taught to depend on. If and when they lodge formal complaints, they become the underdog against a powerful establishment hell-bent on protecting itself. Their cases are dismissed, minimized, erased. The problem of corrupt policing continues, and the victims multiply.
Source image: Chase Baker / Unsplash
