New York City police officers claimed they were trying to “avoid the collision” when an unmarked NYPD car struck a Black man riding a scooter in 2023. The vehicle swerved from the middle lane into a bike lane and hit the man head-on.
This led to the man flying into the windshield, and he was left unconscious on the ground. However, thanks to a surveillance video, the officers’ account of the whole incident turned out to be false.
The victim, 40-year-old Delonny Davis, has now filed a federal lawsuit accusing the officers of excessive force, malicious prosecution, denial of fair trial, failure to intervene, and negligence.
His complaint describes the NYPD’s “Community Response Team” as a “secretive unit of plainclothes officers whose history of misconduct has been well-documented.” The suit further alleges that the NYPD had adopted a policy that allows officers to use their patrol cars as weapons, even when there are minor issues.
On August 28, 2023 Davis was riding his scooter on a public street. He was headed to a Boost Mobile store in Manhattan to fix his phone when he noticed that a car was following him. Initially, he was not aware of the car belonging to the police and thus, after passing the store he turned around in the bike lane. It was at that moment that Officer Nikolaos Liandrakis suddenly swerved into the lane, hitting Davis head-on.
“Concerned as to why someone would be following him, Mr. Davis initially drove past the Boost Mobile store,” the lawsuit states, as reported by Atlanta Black Star. “Realizing that he had missed the store, Mr. Davis turned around and drove the short distance back eastbound in the bike lane.” It continues, “As Mr. Davis rode eastbound… Defendant Liandrakis quickly swerved his unmarked NYPD vehicle out of the middle lane and directly into the bike lane, intentionally striking Mr. Davis head-on.”
The crash “threw Mr. Davis into the air” before he crashed into the car’s hood. His head “struck the windshield with such force that the windshield on the NYPD vehicle cracked.” He lost consciousness and later woke up to officers “placing handcuffs on him.”
Despite his injuries, Davis was not provided with proper medical care. He was bleeding, dizzy, and barely able to walk and yet, the involved officers considered that he should be taken to jail instead of a hospital.
While an ambulance did arrive twenty minutes after the collision, it left after officers overruled paramedics. Davis was booked in jail for hours and later charged with reckless driving, reckless endangerment, unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, and driving the wrong way on a one-way street.
The complaint filed against Davis states that he “crashed into a police vehicle that was attempting to avoid the collision.” The video evidence revealed otherwise, leading to the dismissal of his reckless driving charge. What happened to the other charges is not entirely clear.
Eight members of the Community Response Team, Liandrakis, Nazir Nazary, Shamari Roberts, Ernest Hernandez, Elvis Rivera, Minzhong Zhu, Andrew Mahoney, and Pronab Adhikary, are named in the lawsuit. Also listed are NYPD Chief of Department John Chell and Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry, accused of enforcing the reckless pursuit policy.
The lawsuit refers to widespread corruption within the CRT, citing ProPublica data showing “more than half of the officers assigned to the CRT have been found to have engaged in misconduct at least once,” compared to 15% across the NYPD.
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“More than 40 officers assigned to the CRT have three or more cases of substantiated misconduct.” Among them, Daughtry “repeatedly engaged in misconduct, including for pointing a gun and threatening to kill a motorcyclist,” while Chell was “found liable by a civil jury for intentionally fatally shooting a man in 2008.”
Officer Liandrakis himself “has an extensive record of alleged misconduct, including allegations of excessive force, false arrest, and malicious prosecution.” The same is true for Roberts, Adhikary, and Hernandez, the latter with substantiated excessive force claims.
The lawsuit links Davis’ ordeal to an NYPD policy launched in 2022 under Mayor Eric Adams, greenlighting officers to pursue and ram vehicles involved in low-level crimes. “Community Response Team officers are plainclothes NYPD officers who typically wear polo shirts and khakis and drive unmarked police vehicles,” the lawsuit explains. “Chell and Daughtry consistently praised CRT’s pursuits of all-terrain vehicles, illegal scooters, and ‘ghost cars’ … as being necessary for public safety.”
From January to June 2023, “there were 625 recorded vehicle pursuits, more than the number of pursuits in the previous five years combined.”
One such pursuit resulted in the death of Samuel Williams, another Black man killed when an unmarked car hit his dirt bike head-on. According to The City, Williams was one of at least a dozen civilians killed since the policy began.
Only after public outrage did NYPD Commissioner Tisch revise the policy in 2025. “In February 2025 … Tisch issued a directive prohibiting officers from engaging in vehicle pursuits for low-level offenses,” the lawsuit notes. Tisch admitted that the NYPD’s “pursuits for violations and low-level crimes can be both potentially dangerous and unnecessary.”
But change came too late for Davis. “In the case of Mr. Davis, the consequences of the implementation of this policy were life-changing,” the lawsuit says. “He was thrown off his scooter into the air and landed headfirst on the windshield and hood of the police car.” The crash left him with “permanent hearing impairment and ongoing pain and soreness to his body.”
