Ashley Southall and Nikita Stewart

Nearly four hours later Headley, 23, left the Boerum Hill facility in handcuffs, after police officers and security guards pried her son from her arms in a chaotic arrest that began when she got into a dispute over whether she was allowed to sit on the floor.

The incident, caught on cellphone videos and shared widely online, has propelled her into the center of a public reckoning over how the city treats people seeking public assistance.

In the last week, Headley has become a cause célèbre for New Yorkers who depend on food stamps and cash public assistance and who say they are often met with hostility and are sometimes threatened with arrest at city benefits offices.

“It’s the story of many other people, it’s not just my story,” Headley said. “My story is the only one that made it to the surface.”

Her arrest highlighted the tension that plays out in public benefit offices throughout the city every day. People seeking benefits are usually under tremendous financial strain and are dealing with an unyielding bureaucracy, and city workers at these offices are under pressure to follow rules, ferret out abuse and keep order.

Those strains occasionally boil over into physical confrontations and arrests, officials said, an outcome that can have lifelong consequences for people already struggling at the bottom of the economic ladder. Since January 2017, law enforcement agencies have been called to food-stamp offices across the city 2,212 times and have arrested 97 people, mainly for assault and obstruction of justice, police said.

Headley had had a difficult two years — a disappointing move to North Carolina, a failed relationship with her son’s father and an arrest on charges of credit-card fraud in New Jersey.

On Thursday, she notified the city that she plans to file a potentially lucrative lawsuit to prevent what happened to her from happening to others.

The political fallout from her detention was another blow to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s image as a champion of the poor. De Blasio has apologized to Headley, but he drew harsh criticism from other Democrats for waiting several days before condemning the arrest.

For the city’s police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, who has committed to training officers to recognize unconscious biases and to de-escalate tensions, the incident raised questions about whether that coaching is taking hold among officers.

“They never asked me my name,” Headley said. “They never said, ‘Hello, who are you?’ They never asked me.”

Headley said she tried to leave the office with her son shortly after police showed up. The officers had been called because Headley had a heated argument with a female security guard, who told her she could not sit on the floor.

She picked up her baby and started to leave, but police said the guard grabbed her arm, and they all tumbled to the floor. Headley said she tried again to go, but a male police officer told her it was too late. She went into “defense mode,” she said.

“In my head, I told myself they’re not going to let me leave,” she said. “I was so afraid. I was combative with my thoughts.”

— ‘You Don’t Roll Over Jazmine’

Headley grew up in Brooklyn, where she is raising her son, Damone Buckman III, in her mother’s apartment in the Brevoort Houses, where she has lived since she was 3 years old. She went to public schools and worked briefly at a nonprofit that helps developmentally disabled adults.

Suzanne Jones, the program’s case manager, said that Headley was driven and knew how to stand her ground. “You don’t roll over Jazmine,” she said. “She’s always going to push her way through.”

Headley stayed on with the nonprofit, Jewel Human Services, for nine months until she said she fell in love and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, to join her boyfriend.

That summer, she was arrested outside Trenton, New Jersey, and charged with taking part in an identity theft and credit-card fraud scheme, prosecutors said. Police seized five phony cards with her name on them.

Her relationship broke up around the time she gave birth to Damone in June 2017, her mother said. Her savings from her job at a Belk department store ran out a couple of months later, and she returned to New York, where she went on public assistance — a monthly allowance of $280 in food stamps and $140 in cash.

In September, she went back to work cleaning offices part time for $13 an hour. Her benefits were cut after she started working, but the city still paid $1,200 each month for Damone’s day care. Then that payment stopped, too.

— Trying to Get Benefits Restored

Headley had taken that Friday off work after the owner of her son’s day care told her Damone could not return if the payment issue was not fixed.

She packed a bag with snacks for him, as well as his favorite toy, a figurine of Chase, a police dog who stars on the children’s television show, PAW Patrol.

“My main objective was to get there, handle business and get home,” Headley said.

With Damone in a stroller, she arrived a few minutes before 10 a.m. at the Human Resources Administration office on Bergen Street and took a number for her turn to talk to a case worker who handles child care assistance.

At 12:20 p.m., she said, her turn came and a case worker told her that she would have to reapply for child care benefits, a process that could take up to a week.

Determined to accomplish something, she decided to check the status of her cash allowance, for which she had reapplied in November. That meant taking another number, and more waiting.

By then, Damone was getting restless. She said she took him to a play area, but workers turned her away because he is not toilet trained.

All the seats in the main waiting area were taken, she said, so she sat on the floor with her back against the blue wall and talked to Damone, who was in a stroller to her right.

— ‘You’re Going to Do What I Say, and That’s It’

A security guard came over and told Headley that she was blocking a fire zone and needed to move.

Headley said she refused, noting that there were trash and recycling bins against the wall on the other side of Damone’s stroller.

“I just remember being talked to very viciously,” she said. “It was more or less: ‘You’re going to do what I say, and that’s it.’ ”

The exchange grew heated, Headley said, and another security guard — the city calls them peace officers — came to demand that she move.

Incensed, Headley said she asked to talk to a supervisor. The guards walked away, Headley said, and 10 minutes passed. Then they returned with two police officers.

She picked Damone up and rose to her feet. One of the police officers told her they did not want to arrest her and she began to leave, holding Damone and pushing the stroller.

Her memory of what happened next is blurry, she said. Police said the first guard grabbed Headley’s arm and they fell to the ground.

“I should’ve left, and I didn’t because if I would’ve left, my son would not have the things that he needs,” Headley said.

Body-cameras worn by the officers recorded the guard telling Headley that if she did not leave she would be taken to central booking and the city’s child-welfare agency would take her son away, according to a person briefed on the matter.

“You’re a joke,” Headley replied, then turned to go, according to the person who was briefed. The peace officer replied: “Really?” then lunged at Headley and grabbed her arm, the person said, and “everyone tumbles down.”

If the guard “had just swallowed it, this would have been over,” a law enforcement official briefed on the body-camera evidence said.

A video posted on Facebook shows Headley trying to reason once more with the officers. “Let me get up,” Headley tells the police officers, who appear to be speaking to her. “I have my rights. I have my rights.” She sits upright on the floor, then says, “Don’t touch me when I get up.”

But the two officers then restrained her while the two guards stripped Damone out of her arms. The baby shrieked while onlookers yelled at police to leave her alone. Headley fought hard to hold onto him, gripping his shirt in her teeth.

Gregory Floyd, the guards’ union president, said the guards, Bettina Barnett-Weekes and Toyin Ramos-Williams, tried to reason with Headley for 40 minutes before police arrived, and that there were rows of seats available in the waiting area. He said Barnett-Weekes was bitten during the fracas.

— Fallout

As Headley’s arrest began drawing attention worldwide — the Facebook videos have been seen more than 1.3 million times — the city social services commissioner suspended the two security guards and started the process of firing them.

“I could only see my children in that situation, and it’s just heartbreaking,” the commissioner, Steven Banks, said.

Banks said his agency was reviewing tactics for dealing with people accompanying children and would retrain the peace officers. The guards also will now be ordered to talk to a supervisor before calling police, unless there is an immediate threat to someone’s safety, he said.

The bureaucratic headache that kept Headley at the Brooklyn office for hours is not unusual. The practice of prematurely closing public benefits cases and forcing recipients to reapply is so common that advocates for the poor have a word for it: churning.

“They call the cops for everything, even if you’re smoking outside,” said Mae Green, an administrator at Bethel Baptist Church, a few doors down from the Boerum Hill office.

Synthia Jean, 38, said she left the Boerum Hill office last month after waiting six hours for officials to reissue a check that was dated for April, but had arrived in November, and to give her an identification card to cash it. She said public benefits offices are “just a bunch of aggravation in one place.”

The Police Department has defended the actions of the two officers, saying the security guards were to blame for the incident getting out of hand. The Civilian Complaint Review Board is investigating the arrest.

Police officials did not respond to questions about whether the officers followed the department’s protocols.

For Headley, the outpouring of sympathy that followed publicity of the arrest has changed her fortunes.

She is being represented by the Midtown law firm, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff &amp; Abady. Her public assistance benefits have been restored. The Brooklyn district attorney dropped charges of resisting arrest and child endangerment, and New Jersey authorities agreed to dismiss the unrelated charges against her if she completes a pretrial diversion program.

“What happened was completely unacceptable and should never happen again in New York City,” Banks said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/nyregion/jazmine-headley-arrest.html" id="72d9140d-59c3-3669-a080-c747e2e9e0a0">The New York Times</a>.

They Grabbed Her Baby and Arrested Her at a Welfare Office. Now She's Speaking Out.

NEW YORK — Jazmine Headley took her baby boy to a public benefits office in Brooklyn on a recent Friday to find out why the city had abruptly stopped paying for him to go to day care while she worked cleaning offices.

Those strains occasionally boil over into physical confrontations and arrests, officials said, an outcome that can have lifelong consequences for people already struggling at the bottom of the economic ladder. Since January 2017, law enforcement agencies have been called to food-stamp offices across the city 2,212 times and have arrested 97 people, mainly for assault and offenses against public administration, police said.

For Headley, the outpouring of sympathy that followed publicity of the arrest has brought her some relief.

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Ashley Southall and Nikita Stewart

Articles written by the author

They Grabbed Her Baby and Arrested Her at a Welfare Office. Now She's Speaking Out.

They Grabbed Her Baby and Arrested Her at a Welfare Office. Now She's Speaking Out.