NY Mayor de Blasio: This Too Will Pass

The number this time was $17 million for three brothers who were wrongfully convicted because of NYPD Detective Lou Scarcella.

The settlements were reached with three defendants whose cases involved Louis Scarcella, the retired homicide detective whose investigative tactics have come under question and whose cases are being reviewed by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

The men, Robert Hill, Alvena Jennette and Darryl Austin, who are half brothers, spent a combined total of 60 years in prison — one died there — before their convictions, made in the 1980s, were vacated by a judge in May.

Back then, Scarcella was a player, closing cases like a boss.  Time changed all that, as it became apparent that Scarcella’s skill at obtaining confessions was based on his ability to make them up and lie about them.

For three Occupy Wall Street protestors, the number was a mere $142,000.  But then, they didn’t have to spend 20 years apiece in prison.

The biggest chunk goes to Sandra Fields, 68, of Manhattan, who will get $75,000 for getting roughed up, said attorney Jeffrey Rothman on Monday. Fields held one end of a banner that read “Occupy” and Sean McKeown, 33, held the other on Sept. 25, 2012, as they marched down Broadway when Lt. Stephen Latalardo attacked her, according to their suit.

In the assault, the aftermath of which was captured on camera, Fields said she was slammed from behind by the strapping cop and her head hit the ground.

Sometimes, cops stare “pure evil” in the face. Sometimes, they tackle 68-year-old women from behind.  They prefer to talk about the former, as the latter doesn’t make them look like heroes.

The New York Police Department’s Inspector General was set to release a report about a month ago, but held it because of the murder of two police officers. As it turned out, it wouldn’t look good, since the IG found that cops were too quick to do harm.

The first investigation by New York City’s police inspector general includes the finding that in several cases where officers were found to have used a chokehold, the banned maneuver was the officer’s initial physical response to verbal resistance.

The 45-page report, released on Monday, follows the death in July of Eric Garner on Staten Island after an arresting officer placed him in a chokehold, a tactic that was banned by the Police Department two decades ago. The report looks at officers’ ongoing use of chokeholds and the department’s handling of such actions.

The report says that the department’s “handling” was essentially to do nothing, but, according to how one interprets things, that may be incorrect.  The NYPD’s failure to punish cops who used the choke hold that killed Eric Garner may have reflected Commissioner Ray Kelly’s fix, that the problem would fade with time.

As part of the plausibly denied union effort to restore the NYPD to its glory as New York’s Finest, Steve Osborn, a retired 20-year cop who is writing a book about how wonderful he was, got some space in the New York Times to explain why his wife loved the First Rule of Policing.

When I was assigned to the Fugitive Division of the New York City Police Department, in the ’90s, I would get out of bed at 3 o’clock each morning, trying not to wake my wife. I would gently kiss her goodbye and leave for work. By 5 a.m. my team and I would be executing the first of several warrants assigned to us for the day. (Mornings are the best time to catch bad guys.) We were arresting the most wanted and dangerous criminals in the city, and the work was, to put it mildly, stressful.

Whether you consider turnstyle jumpers the most wanted and dangerous criminals in the city is up to you. Some can be quite ornery when woken early.

By 9 a.m. we would be back in our office processing our arrests, and I would call my wife without fail, in case she had overslept, and to let her know that I was O.K. and still in one piece.

Years later, during a tearful venting, my wife confided that those calls were seldom needed to wake her because she was usually lying in bed, tossing and turning and fearing that she would get another kind of call. She couldn’t rest until she had word that I was off the streets and safe for another day.

What wife would feel otherwise? Heartbreaking.  And the mayor, who didn’t realize that the police didn’t respect him, believed he had it all “under control.”

The mayor is now shifting his approach. He took pains last week to emphatically convey respect for the police, trumpeting current low crime rates while twice describing the force as “the world’s greatest.” He also criticized the back-turning protests, echoing mayoral aides who were privately upset over the incendiary remarks of police union leaders.

“This is a mayor who — not for show, not for cameras, not just in the past six weeks — when passing a cop on the beat, or a cop standing post, shakes hands and engages,” said Phil Walzak, the mayor’s press secretary. “A meet-and-greet, and words of thank you, to virtually every cop he comes across in the city doing their job.”

After all, with all the many problems that arise in a city like New York, none are worse than losing the support of the police.

As Tom Nichols points out, the comparison between police and military is flawed. If the military was to take up arms against civilian authority, it would be a coup d’état, seizing political control.  The NYPD doesn’t want such control. They want paychecks and pensions, and need the people of New York to keep paying taxes to fund them.  They need civilian authority to fund the fisc, to fund their pension.

But they also want civilian authority to remember whose support it needs to survive.  So what if they use chokeholds?  So what if the city has to pay out millions for bad cops, and hundreds of thousands for throwing protesting women to the ground?  What about their cop wives, lying awake in their beds?  Don’t you care about the wives?

According to the Times, de Blasio believed that it would all pass. Time heals all wounds.  In time, the people would get tired and bored, and their attention would wane.  Not the cops, but the public.  And New York City will return to its usual ways, and the police will again be called New York’s Finest as the comptroller writes the next million dollar check and a judge rejects the defense’s contention that a cop lied.  In time, everything will return to normal.

3 thoughts on “NY Mayor de Blasio: This Too Will Pass

  1. DaveL

    The problem I have with Tom Nichols’s assessment is that many of the qualifiers he makes for police forces seem to have broken down when it comes to the NYPD. How can NYC’s central government claim a monopoly on organized violence if the police openly disregard city government, or if they can flout the law with impunity? What use is it talking about what authority is given to the police to use force if there are no consequences for exceeding that authority? What good does it say they can be fired for misconduct, if in practice, they really cannot?

Comments are closed.