In fairness, New York City has no shortage of nuts.  But then, that includes the NYPD, whose officers aren’t necessarily inclined to spend a great deal of time pondering whether someone stopped really is what he says he is or just left his tin foil hat behind that day.  That’s what Bellevue is there to do.

Via that bastion of journalistic accuracy and the occasional multi-sentence paragraph, the New York Post :

Shaun Day, 29, was on a two-week leave when cops harpooned him for running a red light at 12:30 a.m. at Second Avenue and East 26th Street.

When cops searched his pickup truck, they discovered a 9mm semiautomatic and three ammunition clips.

During the arrest, Day was rambling incoherently and harped that he was a SEAL — but had no proof for cops.

He claimed he was an elite commando with “top- secret clearance,” cops said.

What’s a cop to do? Bellevue, baby.  As it turns out, Shaun Day was a Navy Seal.  As it turns out, there is  no “proof for cops” that someone is a Navy Seal for good reason :

Many SEAL impostors offer tattoos as evidence that they are actually members of the US Navy’s SEAL Teams…It is perhaps appropriate to point out that the requirements of Operational Security (OPSEC) and Personal Security (PERSEC) are not well served if members of an elite military force like the SEALs are wearing the identifying emblem of their unit tattooed on their bodies. These are not the freewheeling days of wooden ships, canvas sails, and sailors wearing exotic tattoos from unheard-of ports in the primitive South Sea Islands. This is the 21st Century, and the modern Navy is a completely different entity. The popularity of tattoos is increasing, including the SEAL Trident emblem or variations on that theme, and more SEALs do have tattoos today than 30-40 years ago. Still, those tattoos are never offered as proof of SEAL training or SEAL duty. There is no tattoo which is either currently recognized or accepted as a means of identifying certain SEAL members.

Without any means of identifying oneself as a Seal, what would you expect of the NYPD?  I venture to guess that most of the people stopped by the NYPD have some story to tell, often that the person stopped is a lawyer and “do they know how important they are?”  It makes Bellevue seem a pretty reasonable choice.

But now that we’re past the cute part of the story, two issues remain untouched. First, what difference does it make that Shaun Day is a Navy Seal if he’s driving around Manhattan with a 9mm handgun in his pickup?  Unless he was on Navy Seal business, he’s subject to the same laws as anyone else in Manhattan, and those laws (whether properly or not) prohibit the unlicensed possession of a weapon.  There are plenty of guys in prison who can tell you that, many of whom only possessed it in self-defense.

More curiously, given that Day was stopped for running a red light, how exactly did the cops come to search his pickup and find the gun?  There is no suggestion that any reason to search existed, even under the amorphous “automobile exception,” for running a red light.  Give him a ticket and wish him well. 

While Shaun Day may be everything he claimed to be, the question remains why the NYPD conducted a search and, now that they know Day is a Seal, seems prepared to give him a free pass. Crazy.