Suffolk County to pay $3 million in police beating settlement

Suffolk County has agreed to pay $3 million to settle a federal civil-rights lawsuit brought by Christopher Cruz, a Long Beach man who said Suffolk officers beat him after he was handcuffed and forced face down in dirty snow in Mount Sinai.

The payment closes the county’s exposure in a case that raised sharp questions about use of force, taxpayer costs and police accountability. Cruz filed the suit in the Eastern District of New York on Feb. 23, 2022, seeking at least $10 million in damages. He named Suffolk County, the Suffolk County Police Department, former Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart and 19 officers as defendants.

The encounter drew unusually close scrutiny because it was captured on body-worn camera video, but the department had very limited access to the technology at the time. Newsday reported that only 10 Suffolk officers were equipped with body cameras when Cruz was arrested on Feb. 24, 2021.

Cruz’s account, echoed in later reporting, says he was punched and kicked while handcuffed and that officers used racial slurs during the attack, including a taunt that he should “eat the snow.” The complaint also said an officer told him he was lucky he did not get a bullet in his face.

The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office later said a nine-month investigation included interviews with 34 witnesses, hundreds of documents, 911 calls, car-to-car radio transmissions, crime-scene photos, the Jeep’s event-data recorder, surveillance video, body-camera video, dash-camera footage, back-seat video from Cruz’s transport to the hospital and civilian-recorded video. That probe led to the only criminal charge in the case: Officer Matthew Cameron was accused of offering a false instrument for filing in the second degree after a special grand jury said he made a false sworn statement tied to Cruz’s resisting-arrest charge.

That resisting-arrest charge was dismissed on June 2, 2021. Cruz later pleaded guilty on Sept. 29, 2021 to petit larceny and received time served.

The settlement lands against a broader backdrop of Suffolk’s slow expansion of body-camera use. In 2021, county officials said 1,600 of the department’s 2,400 officers would be eligible to wear cameras under a reform deal with the police union. By June 2022, Suffolk said about 130 officers at the 7th Precinct would get cameras in the first rollout phase, with the county setting aside $24 million over five years for the program, implementation and data systems.

The case grew out of the county’s Police Reform and Reinvention Task Force, a 37-member panel assembled in 2020 after New York’s police-reform directive following George Floyd’s murder. For Suffolk, the $3 million settlement is a costly reminder that accountability reforms are measured not only in policy promises, but in what happens after the arrest.