Ten minutes after the city’s emergency curfew kicked in on a sunny evening five years ago, NYPD detective Jason Ragoo stood over a female protester he had just taken to the ground on West Street in Lower Manhattan.
As the woman covered her head and bent her knees in a fetal position, Ragoo gripped his baton like a battering ram, swung his arms back, and jabbed the end of the nightstick into her ribs, video of the incident newly obtained by THE CITY shows.
It was one of scores of incidents involving local police and demonstrators at the height of protests prompted by George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police that prompted more than a thousand complaints of excessive force to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates police misconduct…