ROCHESTER, NY – The former Rochester police chief said he initially saw nothing “shocking” in the video of the police body arresting Daniel Prude, the black man who died after being kept naked on a city street in winter past.
La’Ron Singletary, who was fired by the mayor after the video’s public release, answered questions on Friday in a live, hour-long deposition about the city’s treatment of the case. The city council’s analysis of the facts is separate from an ongoing grand jury investigation into Prude’s death.
The video shows Prude handcuffed and naked with a spit hood on his head as one policeman pushes his face against the floor, while another policeman presses a knee to his back in the early morning of March 23. The cops held him for about two minutes until he stopped breathing. He was removed from life support a week later.
Singletary said she spoke to Mayor Lovely Warren twice on March 23 and by now had seen some of the body’s camera footage, according to the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester.
“It looked like there was nothing shocking at the time,” Singletary told Warren. “I explained to the mayor that we were going to do an investigation. I told the mayor that there were no strikes, there were no punches in relation to the video ”.
The county coroner listed the form of death as homicide caused by “choking complications in a physical containment environment” and cited the PCP as a contributing factor.
The Prude family held a press conference and released the video on September 2, sparking nightly protests in Rochester.
Singletary said in court documents filed in December that Warren urged him to omit facts and provide false information to support his claim that it was only months later that she learned the main details of the police meeting that led to Prude’s death. On Friday, he said he was asked to “provide false information to support his narrative”.
The city released a statement on Friday saying that Singletary “downplayed what has happened from the beginning to today and believes that neither he nor anyone in the Rochester Police Department has done anything wrong.”