February 9, 2025
Many are calling for the police to take public accountability for the troubling misidentification.
According to The Associated Press, the New York City Police Department is facing backlash for falsely accusing a 15-year-old Black teen of a mass shooting at the West Indian American Day parade in September 2024 on social media.
Camden Lee, the teenager who was falsely accused by the NYPD, described to the news service what he felt when he first saw his name and face attached to the shooting which resulted in the death of one person and the wounding of four others.
“I see the NYPD logo. I see me. I see ‘suspect wanted for murder,’” Lee recalled to the AP. “I couldn’t believe what was happening. Then everything went blurry.”
The department is refusing to publicly acknowledge the error, ignoring desperate pleas from Lee's family, who say their lives are at risk.
Instead, the NYPD quietly deleted the tweets and scrubbed Lee's photo from @NYPDTips and Crime Stoppers. But it's still over the internet pic.twitter.com/vtMpBnBzcD
Justice for Camden Lee. This poor baby is only 15 years old and the racist ass NYPD have knowingly put a target on his back and they refuse to acknowledge it. https://t.co/dOswVCUFH8
Lee’s mother, Chee Chee Brock, whose elder son recently joined the NYPD, indicated that the incident caused her to lose faith in the NYPD.
“I used to have a lot of trust in the NYPD and how they do things,” Brock said. “But I raised my kids to admit when they made a mistake. If you can blame an innocent kid for murder, what else can you get away with?”
Although the NYPD privately met with Lee’s lawyer and scrubbed the photograph of him from their social media accounts, his family said they feel the department has not yet taken any public accountability.
Delaney Kempner, the NYPD’s newly appointed spokesperson, and the department’s Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, indicated to the AP that she will look into what happened, but did not elaborate further.
Lee, who was at the parade when the shooting happened, was captured in a surveillance image watching in disbelief after his friend was grazed in the shoulder by a bullet and subsequently carried away on a stretcher.
Once the police put out the image positioning Lee as the suspect, his mother immediately called a lawyer, Kenneth Montgomery, who set up a meeting with NYPD homicide detectives that night.
According to Montgomery, although the detectives said the department made a mistake, their attitude rubbed him the wrong way.
“They conceded they got it wrong,” Montgomery told the AP. “But these officers were so cavalier about it. It was like they were playing a game with a kid’s life.”
According to Wylie Stecklow, a civil rights attorney who is also representing the family, the department’s inability to own up to a significant mistake is a troubling development.
“There’s tremendous pressure on the NYPD to serve up results in a high-profile shooting like this,” Stecklow told the AP. “The fact that they’ve failed to explain how this mistake was made, and how they’ll avoid it in the future, is deeply troubling.”
The NYPD said at a news conference immediately following the shooting that their suspect was a slim man in his 20s who wore a bandana and wore a paint-stained brown shirt and that they suspected that the shooting was gang-related, neither of which matched the now 16-year-old Lee.
Lee, meanwhile, has suffered academically as a result of the fallout from being falsely accused of the shooting and his mother worries for his safety.
“As a mom, the No. 1 thing I’m scared of is losing my kids to the streets or the jail system,” Brock said. “So he doesn’t have freedom now. When he goes to the corner store, I time him.”
The image of Lee, although it was scrubbed from the department’s social media, was not pulled from media reports, or explained by the NYPD publicly that Lee is not and never was confirmed to be the shooter, which led to the image’s recent recirculation, which for Lee, has brought everything right back to where it was when he was first falsely accused of being the shooter by the NYPD.
“For the photo to come out again, it brought it all back to the start,” Lee said. “My mom was just thinking of letting me go on the train again. It takes me to a dark place. I don’t feel like myself anymore. I don’t have the opportunity to explain my side of the story. Everyone is so fixed on this one image of me: murderer.”
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