Chaos ensued when Dean Taylor, 65, a Black man, tried recording the Buffalo police across the street. The incident unfolded when the cops were investigating a drive-by shooting of a house in 2019. The officers approached Taylor and informed him that the neighbors did not want him to capture the investigation on camera.
However, the Black man exercised his First Amendment right that allows him to record the entire ordeal in public. He told the cops that he was mainly recording them, and not the other residents. The whole thing got intense within the blink of an eye when the officers punched Taylor in the face several times. According to the Atlanta Black Star, the officers shoved the man to the ground and piled on top of him. At one point, one cop even pressed his knee into Taylor’s neck.
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Dean was then taken to jail on charges of harassment, obstructing governmental administration, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. In response, he filed a lawsuit against the Buffalo Police who arrested him. Initially, the jury sided with the cops.
However, a big twist came in the case when the judge who was overseeing the trial overturned the jury’s verdict. The rare legal move came after Blake Zaccagnino from the Shaw & Shaw law firm, one of the attorneys representing Taylor, filed a post-trial motion. He asked the judge to dismiss the jury’s decision for a new trial under the Civil Practice Law and Rules.
Then, the New York Supreme Court Judge John DelMonte declared, “The plaintiff’s physical position and presence at the incident scene was a public space that he was constitutionally entitled to traverse and occupy, which the officer defendants were trained to respect as part of their public duty.”
“The factual record in this case is clear on this issue…the officer defendants admitted that they knew the plaintiff was entirely within his constitutional right to videotape the public presence and performance of duties of the BPD,” wrote the judge in his opinion published on September 19, 2025.
While testifying, Dean Taylor revealed that when he initially started recording, he did not know what had taken place. A woman initially asked him to stop recording in a harassing tone. However, he remained in his spot for 0 minutes before a cop came and informed him not to record, before it went into a physical altercation.
The cop, later identified as Moriarity, testified that Taylor had “no legitimate purpose” for recording. “After many options verbally, many, many attempts to de-escalate this, I went and grabbed his left arm. He threw his left elbow up, which I perceived as an attempted elbow strike on my face. I called for help, and he was taken to the ground and handcuffed,” said the cop.
Judge DelMonte disagreed with the jury, which sided with the cops. “There was no legally legitimate basis for any ‘reasonably prudent person’ to find or believe that probable cause existed to confront the plaintiff and place him under arrest for any plausible and justifiable criminal offense under the ‘totality of the circumstances’ shown in this action,” DelMonte wrote, dismissing the charges against Taylor.
