Paul Chevingy, Early Voice on Police Brutality, Dies at 88

In 1964, Paul G. Chevigny left a conventional job at a Wall Street law firm to volunteer for the Freedom Summer of civil rights activism in Mississippi.

What he saw in the Deep South, where efforts to register black voters were met with violence, changed his life. He left corporate law and opened the Harlem Neighborhood Legal Assistance Project on West 135th Street.

In Mississippi and Harlem the eyes of Mr. Chevigny opened up to a level of police brutality that was often experienced by black residents of poor communities, but that many white Americans were unaware of.

In 1966, he began working for the New York Civil Liberties Union, where he became one of the nation’s leading experts on police abuse and a leading civil rights attorney, winning landmark cases challenging police interference with the rights of the First Amendment was limited.

Mr Chevigny – who wrote a groundbreaking book on police abuse, ‘Police Power’; who defended Attica Prison rioters and Black Panthers; and who, as a professor at New York University Law School, founded one of the first human rights clinics at an American law school – died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

His daughter Blue Sevigny confirmed the death.

“His greatest impact was recognizing and writing powerfully about the systemic existence of police abuse,” Burt Neuborne, a former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview. “He was the first of the wave of civil rights lawyers to see that.”

In “Police Power,” published in 1969, Mr. Chevigny describes wrote that while most people likely viewed police brutality as an intentional act, “the truth is that many incidents of use of force by police officers bear an unfortunate resemblance to attacks by private citizens; they are hot-headed responses to a real or imagined insult.” But premeditated or not, he claimed, police brutality expanded “the role of the police as an instrument of authority in society.”

Mr. Chevigny’s eleven years at the New York Civil Liberties Union coincided with a fertile era for social justice progress, shaped by a liberal judiciary open to new interpretations of the Constitution and by civil rights, women’s rights and anti-war movements, which profoundly shook up the civil rights, women’s rights and anti-war movements. society.

In addition to the heavy burden of police abuse, Mr. Chevigny found time in his career to bring cases targeting New York City’s nightlife restrictions based on free speech arguments.

Colleagues described him as reminiscent of Columbo, the television detective played by Peter Falk: distracted and sometimes grumpy, but much sharper than his manner suggested.

“He used to shuffle around until he was standing on your throat,” Mr. Neuborne said. “When I was a very young lawyer, I went to him to argue a few cases. On the way to the courthouse he said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” And then he stood up and made this wonderfully brilliant argument.”

In 1971, Mr. Chevigny and other lawyers sued the New York City police over its surveillance of political activities, a decades-long espionage campaign that was exposed during a trial of members of the Black Panther Party, who were acquitted. The police’s so-called Red Squad had collected files over the years on crowds of people who had attended anti-Vietnam war protests, signed petitions, written articles or gone to rallies. After more than a decade of litigation, the city signed a consent decree in 1985, known as the Handschu Treatythus limiting espionage and undercover operations by police.

“His overall theme was: who will guard the guards? Who will watch over the people who watch over us?” said Jethro M. Eisenstein, a lawyer who worked with Mr. Chevigny on the Handschu settlement, which remains in effect.

In 1977, in another landmark First Amendment case, Black v. Codd, Mr. Chevigny won a consent decree that gave observers of police actions the right to take photographs, write down badge numbers and make comments without being harassed or arrested.

That year, Mr. Chevigny joined the faculty of New York University Law School, where he became a professor in 1981. He ran a human rights legal clinic in which students represented real clients.

Together with his wife, Bell Gale Chevigny, professor of literature at the State University of New York at Purchase, Mr. Chevigny expanded his research on police violence to Third World cities. The couple co-authored two reports for the human rights organization Americas Watch: ‘Police Abuses in Brazil’ (1987) and ‘Police Violence in Argentina’ (1991).

In 1995, Mr. Chevigny published a second influential book, “Edge of the Knife,” an ambitious examination of police violence in six cities in America.

“I felt like I was on some sort of mission regarding the police problem,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1988. “It seemed to me that police abuse was the result of some systemic social problem. I discovered that society was not generous enough to solve its inequalities, so it requires a certain amount of control, and calls on the police to do the dirty work.”

Throughout his life, Mr. Sevigny was a lover of jazz and blues. In the 1980s, while visiting a jazz club on the Upper West Side, he learned about the city’s Prohibition era. Cabaret law.

That law required that any venue where music or dancing took place and food was served had to be licensed. Bars and restaurants with live music could operate without a permit, but only if the music they presented was “incidental” — which the law defined as no more than three performers and three types of instruments on a stage at the same time.

For years, club owners and musicians had tried to repeal the ordinance. Mr. Sevigny floated the idea of ​​a legal challenge under the First Amendment.

A Manhattan Supreme Court judge issued two rulings 1986 And 1988Prosecutors of Mr Sevigny – a vibraphonist, trumpeter and singer – said the cabaret law violated musicians’ right to freedom of expression. Mr. Sevigny became a celebrity in clubs around the city.

Paul Graves Chevigny was born on July 12, 1935 in Seattle. His father, Hector Chevigny, was a radio play writer. His mother, Claire (Graves) Chevigny, was a newspaper columnist and teacher.

Mr. Chevigny graduated from Yale College in 1957 and from Harvard Law School in 1960. After 57 years of marriage, his wife died in 2021. In addition to his daughter Blue, he is survived by a daughter, Katy Chevigny, and two grandchildren.

In middle age, Mr. Chevigny took up tap dancing after watching a class one of his daughters was taking. He was inspired to revise part of the cabaret law, which was still in force, and dance in bars and restaurants without a license.

Again, he brought a suit, arguing that dancing is free speech protected by the New York State Constitution. The court ruled against Mr. Chevigny in 2006, though the judge urged lawmakers to raise the issue. to write“Sure, the Big Apple is big enough to find a way to make people dance.”

The city council revoked the dancing ban in 2017.