The following remarks were made by Celine Zhu at the Justice Committee's rally + press conference in New York City on July 11:

Good afternoon. My name is Celine, and I am an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where we are counsel for Floyd v. City of New York which showed the NYPD was engaged in widespread racial profiling and unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policing, and we have been fighting for over two decades alongside community groups and families seeking accountability for the NYPD’s practice of racial profiling and unconstitutional stop, question, and frisk practices. 

I am here because Allan Feliz should be alive today. He should never have been stopped in his vehicle, and NYPD Lt. Jonathan Rivera should have never killed him.

None of us can undo what Lt. Rivera did, and none of us can ever repair the loss that the Feliz family feels today. But not only did the NYPD needlessly take away the life of Allan Feliz, they have—and continue—to put his family through unimaginable hardship.

For almost six years the Feliz family has watched and fought as the NYPD has obstructed their own discipline process. This February, it seemed—for a moment—that their fight had paid off: when the case against Lt. Rivera finally reached the NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Trials, Lt. Rivera was found guilty—after a multi-day trial with evidence and witnesses—of excessive force and assault, and recommended that Lt. Rivera be fired.

Commissioner Tisch’s decision to delay the process another 5 months while the Feliz family painfully waited, and then preliminarily overturn her own Deputy Commissioner’s verdict, is legally untenable, and an insult not only to his family but the people of New York. It would be a rubber stamp on the NYPD’s violent lawlessness. 

We are here today to demand Commissioner Tisch immediately reverse her preliminary decision, uphold Lt. Rivera’s guilty verdict, and to fire him and remove him from policing our streets. If Commissioner Tisch follows through with reversing this verdict, it is a massive step backward and a slap in the face to tens of thousands of New Yorkers.

Because while ten of thousands of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers continue to be needlessly and unconstitutionally stopped by police every year, the NYPD continues to tell us to trust their discipline process; and that it will deliver accountability.

But Tisch has proven today that those promises cannot be relied upon. Tisch’s talk about reform is meaningless if she is unwilling to hold the NYPD accountable even when her own process delivers a just outcome. Tisch has an opportunity to reverse her preliminary decision: to show us that she agrees that it is unacceptable to her that Allan Feliz is not alive today, and that it is unacceptable to her that the NYPD promotes, rather than disciplines, such egregious and continued misconduct.

Commissioner Tisch must reverse her preliminary decision. We demand no less. Thank you.