Incident

Incident Description

Dean Taylor, a 65-year-old Black man, stood on the sidewalk across the street from the scene of the drive-by shooting, recording the activity with his phone. Taylor continued to do so for some time, before Buffalo police officers Kyle T Moriarity and Christopher Bridgett decided they wanted him to stop. Moriarty approached Taylor and told him to move, according to testimony. Taylor replied that he had a right to stand on a public sidewalk and record the scene.

Taylor said an officer punched him in the face “three or four times” and tackled him to the ground. He lost consciousness, then came to “with a whole bunch of people” on him. He was handcuffed, wrestled into the back of a patrol car and taken downtown, where he was strip-searched and jailed overnight. The next day he was charged with resisting arrest, obstruction of governmental administration, harassment and disorderly conduct.

Outcome

The charges against Taylor were dismissed in city court a month later.

Taylor filed a complaint with the Buffalo Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division. In January 2020 then-Police Commissioner Byron Lockwood ruled Taylor’s allegation of excessive use of force “not sustained” — that is, there was not enough evidence to determine the officers’ guilt or innocence — but reprimanded the officers for “denying [Taylor his] first amendment rights.”

A month after that finding, Taylor sued the city, Lockwood, Moriarty, Bridgett and the other officers who piled on top of him. He accused them of assault, false arrest and imprisonment, and violating his constitutional rights.

Five years later, the case went to trial before a jury, which ruled in favor of the cops and the city. Taylor’s attorney, Blake Zaccagnino of the firm Shaw & Shaw, filed a post-trial motion asking DelMonte to set aside the jury’s decision, arguing that the jury’s verdict was contrary to the weight of the evidence.

In overturning the verdict, the judge wrote the cops “knew the plaintiff was entirely within his constitutional rights to videotape” police activity at the scene of the shooting. He said the city’s attorneys failed to provide evidence that Taylor’s presence harassed or discomfited anyone — except perhaps Moriarity and Bridgett, who “did express their own personal internal distaste for what the plaintiff was doing,” DelMonte wrote.

“[T]here was no legally legitimate basis for any ‘reasonably prudent person’ to find or believe that probable cause existed to confront the plaintiff and place him under arrest,” DelMonte concluded.

DelMonte set aside the jury’s decision, found in favor of Taylor, and ordered a new trial solely for the purpose of determining how much the city should pay in damages.