The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is referred to as "New York's Finest," and has a motto of
Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect, emblazoned on the side of their shiny blue-and-white patrol cars.
Tell that to the family of Eric Garner. Choking a man to death ain't about respect. It's about homicide.
My condolences go out to his family and community. I'm glad to see the rising outrage and protests taking place across the nation, and in my home town. I was, however, completely unsurprised when the grand jury, drawn from a pool of some of the whitest, most conservative and racist areas of what outsiders assume is "liberal" New York did not chose to indict.
Same shit, different day—another murder by cop in the Big Apple. What does surprise me is that so many people seem to be shocked. By Ferguson, New York, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Sanford, San Francisco ... you name the city, and I'll tell you how many black and brown people feel about their occupiers.
I've read a lot of comments from those who are stunned that indictments, followed by convictions, don't happen, who've stated that "racism and murder-by-cop is getting worse," and they seem to be under the impression that this is somehow a new phenomena.
Let's talk about New York City cops and their historical "relationship" with the black and Latino communities, a relationship that was foul before the force was integrated, and fraught with tensions from the time blacks and Puerto Ricans began to be hired, with push-back from white cops and the Patrolman's Benevolent Association (PBA). Today's events stand on the shoulders of a long and ugly history, with brief periods when attempts were made to make positive changes.
Perhaps that history will provide some insight into how we need to move forward together to stop what has been going on for far too long—before the internet, Twitter, cell phones with cameras, and viral videos made what has not been the concern of many (except for the dead, their families and those living under the yoke) finally "highly visible" to more than "just us" folks who've had to live and die with it, receiving little or no justice.
Follow me below the fold for more.
Back in 1996, Bob Herbert—the first black op-ed columnist at New York Times from 1993 until he resigned in 2011—wrote, Sickness In the N.Y.P.D.:
One April morning in 1973 a veteran police officer named Thomas Shea pulled his service revolver and blew away a young black boy on a street in Jamaica, Queens. He shot the kid in the back. There was no chance of survival. Afterward, no one could figure out why the officer had done it. There was no reason for the shooting, no threat to Officer Shea of any kind. The boy's name was Clifford Glover and he was 10 years old.
Officer Shea was charged with murder but of course he was acquitted.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1976 an officer named Robert Torsney fired a bullet into the head of Randolph Evans, 15, outside a housing project in Brooklyn. No one could figure that one out, either. Officer Torsney would later claim he had been afflicted with a rare form of epilepsy that, remarkably, had never been noticed before the killing and was never seen after it.
The ''epilepsy'' defense worked. Officer Torsney was acquitted of any criminal wrongdoing.
The bridge between those outlandish cases of the 1970's and Monday's demoralizing acquittal of Police Officer Francis X. Livoti in the killing of Anthony Baez is littered with the bodies of New Yorkers of all ages whose lives were summarily and unjustly taken by New York City cops who managed in virtually every instance to beat the rap.
He goes on to detail the dirty laundry list of killings by cops that was all too familiar to those of us who had to live or die with it.
He concluded:
In recent years the department has gotten more brutal, not less, with civilian complaints up from 977 in 1987 to more than 2,000 in 1994, according to a study by Amnesty International. The study said the amount of money paid to complainants in settlements or judgments in police abuse cases had also risen, from $13.5 million in 1992 to more than $24 million in 1994.
No one wants to pay much attention, but there is an awful sickness coursing through the N.Y.P.D., the only city agency that tolerates murder.
Anthony Baez was choked to death by NYPD officer Frances Livoti. The Baez family is
reliving the murder of their son as the events unfold around the choking to death of Eric Garner.
Here's Inez Baez, one of the mother's of sons murdered by cops featured in the documentary film, Every Mother's Son:
Iris Baez, a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, never meant to become an activist. Kadiatou Diallo never meant to leave her home in Africa and move to the U.S., to fight for justice for her son. Doris Busch Boskey, a Jewish woman from the suburbs, never thought she'd become a spokesperson against police brutality. This film profiles three women from very different walks of life who find themselves united to seek justice after their sons are unjustly killed by police. Their stories are tragic, but their courage is transformative.
I will never forget Anthony Baez. I will never forget 10-year-old Clifford Glover. My family lived in Queens not far from where he was murdered by NYPD Officer Thomas Shea, who was
indicted and acquitted.
The sun was not yet up on April 28, 1973, as Add Armstead and a companion walked to work along New York Blvd. in South Jamaica, Queens. “We were walking, not saying anything to each other, and this car pulls up, and this white fella opens the door with a gun,” Armstead later said. It seemed like a stickup, so Armstead and the companion ran. The gunman hollered, “You black son of a bitches!” Armstead heard gunshots and a cry from his companion: “I’m shot!”
It turned out the gunman was not a robber. He was a plainclothes cop named Thomas Shea. He and his partner, Walter Scott, were looking for two men who had robbed a cabby in the neighborhood that Saturday morning. In the moments after the fatal shooting, Shea and Scott were recorded on walkie-talkie transmissions to a dispatcher making peculiar comments. “Die, you little bastard,” Scott was overheard saying. One of the cops added a victory whoop: “The good guys won!”
The celebration ended when a precinct commander arrived, took a look at the dead person and asked Shea, “Didn’t you recognize that he was a kid?” The victim, Clifford Glover, was 10 years old and weighed 90 pounds. He had been shot in the back. A fourth-grader at PS 40, he often accompanied Armstead, his stepfather, to work at a local junkyard on Saturdays. “They killed my son in cold blood,” said his mother, Eloise Armstead.
Clifford Glover was 10.
Tamir Rice was 12.
Andy Lopez was 13. New York, Ohio, California. Same M.O. Racism and police killings have no geographical boundaries.
New York City has the bragging rights, however, for one of the longest and oldest reps for corruption and brutality. And don't think that only black and brown people write about it, or have attempted to do something about it. For a while, NYC cops were in not only the national, but international, spotlight.
In a review of They Wished They Were Honest:The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption, by Michael F. Armstrong, Philip Messing at the New York Post (hardly a bastion of liberalism) dubs corrupt NYPD cops, "New York’s foulest."
Consider the remarkable tale of two Knapp Commission witnesses who were known simply as “Tank and Slim,” young junkies and registered police informants — their real IDs were only known to a select few. Their unique status — Tank and Slim readily traded information to the cops about drug dealers in return for payment in the form of dope from the evidence room — gave them easy access to some 70 officers assigned to a Harlem narcotics-enforcement unit, the majority of whom were corrupt.
“With Tank and Slim,” Armstrong writes, “the cops took it one step further. They exchanged drugs not merely for information, but for merchandise. A cop would ‘order’ some liquor, a household appliance, a television set and the like and Tank and Slim would steal the item for him. Or get it from a fence, taking payment from the cop in heroin or cocaine.”
The barest pretenses of honesty had evaporated, with some of the negotiations that took place between the duo and the corrupt narcotics detectives taking place “just two doors down” from the police station.
Do you wonder why kids in my neighborhoods when I was growing up in New York City had no respect for cops? There was no mythical "Officer Friendly." I've watched cops bust a dope joint, stick up the dealers, take their product, and go around the corner and sell it. Same cops who bust black heads for the heck of it. Yeah. Cops who shoot us, and sometimes make "mistakes" and shoot undercover black and Latino officers.
Renee Graham at the Boston Globe just wrote For African-American children, there’s no ‘Officer Friendly’:
Once a year, every year of my elementary school life, a police officer from the local precinct would be a special guest at our assembly. Clad in his starched uniform, the officer – always white and male, in those days – would tell an auditorium filled with fidgety kids about all the good things cops do to make our communities safe. They were, we were told, our guardians, our bulwark against those who would do us harm.
During the question-and-answer period, when some student inevitably would ask the officer whether he had ever used his gun to shoot someone, the cop would always say no. Then gently, but emphatically, he’d assert that the primary goal of the police department is to help people, not hurt them. Whether it was “Officer Mike” or “Officer Steve,” they were collectively known as “Officer Friendly,” and the overt message was always the same: a police officer is your buddy, your trusted ally in a time of need.
In America today, few African-American children likely view cops as their friends.
I remember those visits. The cops were always white. Polite. Smiling. I knew better.
No coincidence that the street term in Spanish for cops was "
La Jara", derived from a Spanglicized version of "O'Hara,"—the perception of all police as big, tall, white Irishmen. Nowadays, an effort is made to put a black or Latino or female face on those community police efforts. During the David Dinkins' mayoral administration in New York City, I observed efforts to establish trust, vis-a-vis the community policing
Safe City, Safe Streets program, which was initiated in 1991—getting cops out of their patrol cars and back walking the beat, while major hires of officers of color were made. Then came Rudy Giuliani,
taking credit for Dinkins' inroads, and aggressively worsening tentative gains.
Going back further in time, it is no wonder I wasn't surprised by the by the revelations made by police detective Frank Serpico in the early 1970s—only that it took so long for there to be a commission and investigation. All you had to have was eyes and ears open in our neighborhoods to know how rotten cops were, and how much of their activity was serving themselves and protecting each other as they did it.
Serpico is lucky to be alive, and he hasn't slowed down in his retirement:
Serpico still speaks out against police corruption brutality, the weakening of civil liberties, and corrupt practices in law enforcement, such as the alleged cover-ups following Abner Louima's torture in 1997 and the Amadou Diallo shooting in 1999. He provides support for "individuals who seek truth and justice even in the face of great personal risk". He calls them "lamp lighters", a term he prefers to the more common "whistleblowers", which refers to alerting the public to danger, just as Paul Revere was responsible for having lamps lit in the Old North Church to warn the public in Charlestown, Massachusetts, of the British Regulars' movements during the American Revolutionary War.
Among police officers, his actions are still controversial, but Eugene O'Donnell, professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, states that "he becomes more of a heroic figure with every passing year."
Serpico recently wrote
The Police Are Still Out of Control: I should know. The piece is four pages long, and deserves a read.
In the NYPD, it used to be you’d fire two shots and then you would assess the situation. You didn’t go off like a madman and empty your magazine and reload. Today it seems these police officers just empty their guns and automatic weapons without thinking, in acts of callousness or racism. They act like they’re in shooting galleries. Today’s uncontrolled firepower, combined with a lack of good training and adequate screening of police academy candidates, has led to a devastating drop in standards. The infamous case of Amadou Diallo in New York—who was shot 41 times in 1999 for no obvious reason—is more typical than you might think. The shooters, of course, were absolved of any wrongdoing, as they almost always are. All a policeman has to say is that “the suspect turned toward me menacingly,” and he does not have to worry about prosecution. In a 2010 case recorded on a police camera in Seattle, John Williams, a 50-year-old traditional carver of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations (tribes), was shot four times by police as he walked across the street with a pocketknife and a piece of cedar in his hands. He died at the scene. It’s like the Keystone Kops, but without being funny at all.
Many white Americans, indoctrinated by the ridiculous number of buddy-cop films and police-themed TV shows that Hollywood has cranked out over the decades—almost all of them portraying police as heroes—may be surprised by the continuing outbursts of anger, the protests in the street against the police that they see in inner-city environments like Ferguson. But they often don’t understand that these minority communities, in many cases, view the police as the enemy. We want to believe that cops are good guys, but let’s face it, any kid in the ghetto knows different. The poor and the disenfranchised in society don’t believe those movies; they see themselves as the victims, and they often are.
For a deep, nuanced and scholarly look at NYPD history, I recommend you read
Becoming New York's Finest: Race, Gender, and the Integration of the NYPD, 1935-1980 by Andrew T. Darien.
In the postwar years, after excluding women, African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities from its ranks for most of its history, the New York City Police Department undertook an aggressive campaign of integration. This exhaustively researched study provides the first comprehensive account of how and why the NYPD came to see integration as a potent political tool, indispensable to policing. At the same time, it shows how white male rank-and-file cops at the same time came under siege from an increasingly controlling management and critical public. The Policemen's Benevolent Association advocated for higher wages, better working conditions, and more control over policing practices while simultaneously fighting to turn back the tide of integration. Out of a complex and multifaceted story, author Andrew Darien presents here a nuanced but accessible narrative of civil rights in the largest municipal police force in the United States - one that is more relevant than ever as Americans continue to struggle with the fraught interrelationships of race, gender, and policing.
Professor Darien, who
teaches history at Salem State University, will soon be publishing the next part of the saga in
New York's Finest: Integration and Identity in the New York City Police Department, 1941-75.
I also recommend Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City by Marilynn S. Johnson:
Street Justice traces the stunning history of police brutality in New York City, and the antibrutality movements that sought to eradicate it, from just after the Civil War through the present. New York's experience with police brutality dates back to the founding of the force and has shown itself in various forms ever since: From late-nineteenth-century "clubbing"-the routine bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen with nightsticks-to the emergence of the "third degree," made notorious by gangster movies, from the violent mass-action policing of political dissidents during periods of social unrest, such as the 1930s and 1960s, to the tumultuous days following September 11.
Yet throughout this varied history, the victims of police violence have remained remarkably similar: they have been predominantly poor and working class, and more often than not they have been minorities. Johnson compellingly argues that the culture of policing will only be changed when enough sustained political pressure and farsighted thinking about law enforcement is brought to bear on the problem.
Do I or did I ever meet good cops? Yes. One in particular, who Darien speaks about in his history was Leonard 12X Weir, known in the Harlem community simply as Lenny, who changed his name later to
Humza Al-Hafeez. Police officers like Al-Hafeez are the exception that proves the systemic racism rule, and it's no coincidence that he was the founder of the
National Society of Afro-American Policemen. He laid the groundwork for similar groups across the nation—Shaun King recently featured the
black officers group in St. Louis. The history and current status of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and women in law enforcement and the challenges they face deserves its own piece, and I promise to write it in the weeks ahead, since we are currently clear that we can no longer tolerate a mostly white occupying army in neighborhoods of color.
Serpico offers his perspective on what he thinks should be done:
1. Strengthen the selection process and psychological screening process for police recruits. Police departments are simply a microcosm of the greater society. If your screening standards encourage corrupt and forceful tendencies, you will end up with a larger concentration of these types of individuals;
2. Provide ongoing, examples-based training and simulations. Not only telling but showing police officers how they are expected to behave and react is critical;
3. Require community involvement from police officers so they know the districts and the individuals they are policing. This will encourage empathy and understanding;
4. Enforce the laws against everyone, including police officers. When police officers do wrong, use those individuals as examples of what not to do – so that others know that this behavior will not be tolerated. And tell the police unions and detective endowment associations they need to keep their noses out of the justice system;
5. Support the good guys. Honest cops who tell the truth and behave in exemplary fashion should be honored, promoted and held up as strong positive examples of what it means to be a cop;
6. Last but not least, police cannot police themselves. Develop permanent, independent boards to review incidents of police corruption and brutality—and then fund them well and support them publicly. Only this can change a culture that has existed since the beginnings of the modern police department.
Many people—activists and politicians alike—are currently working hard on ideas for changing legislation, and the way we are policed, even as protests across the nation continue, including a group right here at Daily Kos,
Support the Dream Defenders whose current project is focusing on improving and promoting the Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act, a Daily Kos community crowdsourced project.
Others are examining the grand jury and jury process, addressing the inequity of how that system works—or works only to benefit certain people—along with the inadequate representation of defendants who are dead and can't speak for themselves, and don't have the luxury and privilege of million-dollar support funds garnered from bigots who are brutality cheerleaders.
This is a long, and multifaceted struggle. No single heinous event, or series of events, will win the battle immediately.
Take your energy and outrage, and help us push forward.