Here’s what you need to know:
- A violent encounter prompts concerns about unequal policing of social distancing.
- ‘Existential crises’ for Ocasio-Cortez as her district becomes the virus epicenter.
- Two homeless men were found dead on the subway.
- Governors of seven Eastern states agree to coordinate on purchasing medical equipment.
- Deaths drop in New York and New Jersey.
A violent encounter prompts concerns about unequal policing of social distancing.
New York City’s public advocate, Jumaane D. Williams, said he didn’t know the specifics.
But the pictures he posted on Sunday — of swarms of mostly white New Yorkers sitting undisturbed in parks, and of what appeared to show combative encounters between the police and brown-skinned New Yorkers — told a story that many found alarming over the weekend.
While the balmy weather flushed millions of New Yorkers out of doors, prompting Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to warn against shirking social distancing restrictions, Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said that the police wrote only about 70 summonses for violating social distancing rules over the weekend.
When those rules were enforced most harshly, the police appeared to be cracking down on nonwhite New Yorkers.
One of the pictures posted by Mr. Williams was a still from video footage captured on Saturday that appeared to show an officer violently escalating a confrontation that police said began as an attempt to enforce social distancing rules.
The police officer in the video, Francis X. Garcia, is shown pointing a stun gun at bystanders before punching and slapping one man to the ground.
The man, one of three people arrested during the encounter, was charged with assaulting a police officer.
Commissioner Shea said that Officer Garcia was stripped of his gun and badge and placed on modified duty while the Internal Affairs Bureau investigated the encounter, which happened on Avenue D in the East Village in Manhattan.
“Certainly some tactics that I was not happy with,” Mr. Shea said on NY1 Monday morning.
Mr. de Blasio wrote on Twitter Sunday night that he was “really disturbed” by the video and added, “The behavior I saw in that video is simply not acceptable.”
The video of the encounter prompted more questions about whether the department was unevenly enforcing social distancing rules, an issue that had flared up the previous week after the mayor personally oversaw the dispersal of a crowd of mourners at the funeral of a Hasidic rabbi in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Mr. de Blasio was asked Sunday about unequal enforcement but did not comment directly.
“What we see in some places is a large number of people in a small area and our job is to make sure they practice social distancing,” he said.
Commissioner Shea said Monday that “in a few areas there was probably too many people out” over the weekend. He added, “This is a great experiment we’re living through here. Really never seen this before in a city of 8.6 million people trying to keep everyone inside.”
Speaking of the police’s encounters with the public over the weekend, he said, “Overall it went well, but I think that this is something that you’re going to see a lot of adjustments made, as we go forward in terms of doing everything possible to keep people as far apart as possible.”
‘Existential crises’ for Ocasio-Cortez as her district becomes the virus epicenter.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman congresswoman from New York, has the distinction of being, at 30, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Now a new, far grimmer, singularity has emerged: She represents the nation’s most devastated hot zone of the coronavirus outbreak.
Her district includes working-class immigrant clusters of the Bronx and Queens and has suffered 19,200 coronavirus cases as of April 30, more than all of Manhattan, despite having almost a million fewer people.
The neighborhoods of Corona and North Corona in her district — the names are an eerie coincidence — have had more coronavirus cases than any ZIP code in the country.
Nearly everyone in the district has had some personal connection to someone lost to the virus. They include Lorena Borjas, a 59-year-old transgender immigrant activist in Queens and Mohammad Gias Uddin, a 64-year-old Bangladeshi community leader who ran a discount store in the Bronx. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez knew both of them, she said.
The overwhelming numbers have affected Ms. Ocasio-Cortez personally but have also exposed the vulnerabilities and isolation of her voice in Congress: She was sole Democrat to vote against the $484 billion relief bill that passed last month, believing it to provide too much to big businesses, and too few protections for the poor.
Two homeless men were found dead on the subway.
Two men, both believed to be homeless, were found dead on subway trains over the weekend in separate instances, according to the police. The causes of their deaths have not yet been determined.
The first man, 56, was found on Friday evening, “slouched over and unconscious” by passengers on a C train at 168th Street in Manhattan, the police said.
The police said there were no signs of trauma on the man, whose name was not released.
The second man was found on Saturday morning in a subway car in Brooklyn, police said. No further details were provided.
One man tested negative for the coronavirus, while the test for the other was pending, the city said.
The deaths come as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the police and the city authorities struggle to remove homeless people from the trains, where they have sought refuge from shelters infested with the virus. Starting this Wednesday, the normally-round-the-clock subway system will close for four hours every night for disinfection.
A spokeswoman for Mayor de Blasio, Freddi Goldstein, wrote on Twitter of the two men, “Our outreach teams were engaging these individuals but they had not yet agreed to come into shelter. Closing the subway nightly will help.”
Kenneth Lovett, a senior adviser at the M.T.A., called the deaths “heartbreaking” and said that the agency was cooperating with the police investigation.
“We have repeatedly said the subways are no replacement for shelter and if these two individuals were indeed homeless, as suspected, it’s clear more needs to be done by the city to ensure all New Yorkers have access to needed shelter and services,” Mr. Lovett said.
Governors of seven Eastern states agree to coordinate on purchasing medical equipment.
A group of Eastern states announced Sunday that they would band together to purchase and allocate the personal protective equipment and medical equipment needed to fight the coronavirus.
Speaking in a joint news conference, the governors of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware said that by aggregating orders, they expected to be able to purchase at lower prices and better stabilize the supply chain.
The governors of Massachusetts and Rhode Island were not present at the conference, but Governor Cuomo of New York said that they would also be included. Those seven states agreed in April to coordinate their reopenings.
Deaths drop in New York and New Jersey.
The governors of New York and New Jersey reported drops in daily death tolls on Sunday.
Governor Cuomo said that 280 more people had died of the coronavirus in New York. That number was down from Saturday, when the state reported 299 deaths, a mild aberration in what has been a consistent downward trend since mid-April.
In New Jersey, Gov. Philip D. Murphy reported that 137 more people had been killed by the coronavirus, bringing the total killed in the state to 7,871.
New Jersey’s daily fatality figures have fluctuated significantly over the past week. Health officials said that was because the numbers reported on any given day included many older deaths newly classified as virus-related, and some days had many more “reclassified” deaths than other days.
Are you a health care worker in the New York area? Tell us what you’re seeing.
As The New York Times follows the spread of the coronavirus across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, we need your help. We want to talk to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, respiratory therapists, emergency services workers, nursing home managers — anyone who can share what’s happening in the region’s hospitals and other health care centers.
A reporter or editor may contact you. Your information will not be published without your consent.
Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Christina Goldbaum, Andy Newman, Sarah Maslin Nir, Sharon Otterman, Azi Paybarah and Ashley Southall.
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