NYPD Arrests Lawyer For Recording Cops In Bed-Stuy, Report Says

BEDFORD-STUYVESANT, BROOKLYN — Defense attorney Molly Griffard says NYPD officers arrested and detained her for recording cops frisking shoplifting suspects in Bed-Stuy.

Or, in one cop's telling, they held her for "privileged white lady BS," Griffard wrote on Twitter.

"If recording cops harass a group of Black teenagers and letting the kids know that they have rights is privileged white lady BS, I will gladly be a Karen against the cops any day," she wrote.

Whether or not Griffard is a "Karen" — the slang term for an entitled white woman fond of speaking to managers — is besides the point in the view of defense attorneys who have rallied around her after the May 3 incident, and subsequent coverage of it first reported by the New York Daily News.

Griffard, an attorney with The Legal Aid Society's Cop Accountability Project, saw something in her wheelhouse while she walked her Yorkie near Tompkins Street and Decatur Avenue — cops taking young men out of a bodega and frisking them, the Daily News reported.

The cops told Griffard to step back as she recorded them and told the young men about their rights, the report states. She told the Daily News she was arrested after she asked a police officer who pushed her back from the scene for his business card.

A NYPD spokesperson told the Daily News that Griffard refused to back up and disobeyed their orders. Cops didn't arrest the shoplifting suspects but detained Griffard for eight hours on suspicion of obstructing governmental administration, the report states.

Read the full Daily News report here.