On October 17, 2019, Allan Feliz, 31, was driving on E. 211th Street in the Bronx with one passenger when he was pulled over by Sergeant Jonathan Rivera and two other officers. They would claim that Allan wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but the footage would show that he was; like most NYPD vehicle stops, this was a case of racial profiling.
After Allan refused to get out of the car, the officers tried to physically remove him. Then Rivera got in, tasered, beat, threatened to shoot, and then shot Allan in the chest. One of the other officers pulled his body from the car, exposing his genitals, and he bled out in the street.
Those are the facts, and they are undisputed. Rivera made two core claims: that he thought one of the other officers was in danger of getting run over by the car and that Allan told his companion to grab a gun. Both were proven to be lies at his NYPD trial in November 2024. Deputy Commissioner Rosemarie Maldonado, who presided over the trial, called Rivera’s story a “carefully constructed departure from the truth” that “fell apart under the weight of the credible evidence.” She found Rivera guilty and recommended that he be fired.
Then, in August 2025, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch rejected the ruling of her own deputy and refused to fire Rivera, who by then had been promoted to Lieutenant.
Last week, in an oral argument on their lawsuit for which they are represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, LatinoJustice and two law firms, the Feliz family and the Justice Committee asked the State Supreme Court to find that Tisch abused her discretion and order her to fire Rivera. “I was born and raised in New York City, but now I can’t imagine staying in this place that has caused my family so much harm – I don’t want us to live in a place where police get away with killing people with impunity,” said Julie Aquino, Allan's partner and the mother of their son, Eli. “I hope Justice Saunders sees this case for what it is: Jessica Tisch’s decision to overturn the guilty verdict was unjust and illegal.”
Their case is strong, but they’re confronting a system designed to protect cops who kill and a political culture bent on denying that police violence remains a pervasive problem.
Seven months after the murder of Allan Feliz, the murder of George Floyd sparked the largest protests in U.S. history. Although there is plenty of evidence that the movement helped elect Joe Biden, it soon became conventional wisdom that the struggle against police violence, particularly the call to defund the police, was disastrous for Democrats. In her presidential run, Kamala Harris, eager to show she was “tough on crime,” kept her distance from the issue.
Under Trump, discussion of police violence among the political class has gone entirely missing. Ironically, cops are beneficiaries of ICE’s violent, racist campaign against immigrants. Even as police departments across the country collaborate with ICE, even as they continue to brutalize immigrants and citizens alike, they can appear almost benign by comparison. And while Trump is unique in his open support for police brutality, it’s not a partisan issue that maps neatly onto the Trump v. Anti-Trump frame that has come to dominate our politics.
The glaring lack of attention on police violence might lead you to believe the problem has abated. In fact, at least 1,314 people were killed by the police in 2025, 18 percent more than in 2019 (though slightly fewer than in 2024.) Cops who kill invariably argue that they feared for their lives, but in 2025, 98 victims were entirely unarmed and only half were armed with a gun. A 2022 study found that fully a third of people killed by the police were trying to flee. In 2025, as always, Black, Latino, and Indigenous people were disproportionately victimized. Since 2013, Black people have been nearly three times more likely than white people to be killed by the police, and the disparity is even sharper for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islaners.
Away from the spotlight, family members of victims and other activists continue to demand justice and accountability. Their odds are long, as they face structural racism and the political power of police, who function in many communities as a shadow ruling force. Of the thousand plus police who shoot people dead each year, only a handful – usually fewer than twenty – face murder or manslaughter charges, and even fewer – never more than eight – are convicted. Consider this: between 2005 and 2024, of the more than 15,000* cops who killed people, only 64 were convicted of a crime. There was not a single conviction in 2023 or 2024.
In 2020, the Office of Attorney General (OAG) declined to press charges against Rivera, choosing to accept his claim that he feared his partner would be crushed beneath the car. Denied justice, Allan’s family is now seeking a measure of accountability in hopes of protecting others from Rivera. They’re asking simply that a violent cop be fired, that the city not pay him to carry a gun, patrol the streets, and terrorize people under the cover of the law.
The family is challenging a system built to shield cops from any kind of discipline. A 2021 NYCLU report found that when the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) substantiated misconduct, as it did in Rivera’s case, the NYPD overrode its recommendation 74 percent of the time. After investigating complaints during the 2020 protests, the CCRB recommended serious discipline for 66 cops, but 26 weren’t sanctioned at all and only five received a penalty more severe than the loss of ten vacation days. ProPublica has reported that under Tisch, the NYPD is tossing out misconduct cases, including ones involving excessive force, without even looking at them.
The conviction of Rivera at his NYPD trial was a rare occurrence that reflected both the egregiousness of his crime and the tireless advocacy of Allan’s supporters. Maldonado has presided over hundreds of trials, but she has previously recommended the firing of only one other cop: Daniel Pantaleo, who infamously killed Eric Garner with an illegal chokehold in 2014. Pantaleo was fired, but only after numerous protests triggered by a videotape of the murder and a five-year struggle by Eric Garner’s family and their supporters.
In refusing to fire Rivera, Tisch accepted the OAG’s report, which predates his trial and doesn’t include the evidence that led to his conviction. As detailed in our complaint, Tisch goes to absurd lengths to cover for Rivera. An important fact in the case is that a few minutes after he killed Allan Feliz, Rivera revealed his motive (or part of it) when he explained to the other officers that his “hand was getting tired.” He later said his hand had been tired from performing CPR. To avoid acknowledging the obvious – that Rivera lied to conceal his motive – Tisch claims he misremembered what happened.
This case now also belongs to Mayor Mamdani, who chose to retain Tisch as police commissioner. Like politicians at the national level, Mamdani would much prefer to focus on affordability and other “bread-and-butter” issues. But in communities where racial profiling is rampant and a traffic stop can be a death sentence, people can’t afford not to focus on police violence. Few in power are listening to their voices at the moment, but last week in a New York City courtroom, the Feliz family was heard.
*There are still no national government statistics on the number of people killed by the police -- the lack is itself part of the problem -- so it falls on advocates and researchers to compile them. The 15,000 figure is an extremely conservative estimate that I made based primarily on statistics provided by Mapping Police Violence, which has researched killings only since 2013. The actual number could be in excess of 20,000.
David Mizner is the communications associate at the Center for Constitutional Rights
