Mr. Dinkins finally got out, surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards, only when Colin Moore, a lawyer respected locally for his civil rights work and defending blacks in difficult cases, including that of the Central Park jogger, pleaded with the crowd through a bullhorn: “Let the mayor go. Let the mayor go back to City Hall.”
A march by several hundred black youths had already veered off to the headquarters of the Lubavitcher Hasidic sect—where a homemade Israeli flag was burned—and there were running, bottle-throwing skirmishes along Eastern Parkway for almost an hour by the time the mayor arrived for a meeting with about 50 black youths at Public School 167 around 5:30 p.m.
The focus of the black protesters had shifted through the day from the Hasidic community itself to the police, who were accused of favoring the Hasidim. The mayor had already incensed the Hasidic community by failing to attend the funeral yesterday morning of Yankel Rosenbaum, the visiting Australian Hasidic scholar who was stabbed to death by a group of black youths. The attack on the 29-year-old Mr. Rosenbaum was in apparent retaliation for the death of 7-year-old Gavin Cato, who was struck by a car driven by a Hasid.
THE NYPD
Officer, Seeking Some Mercy, Admits to Louima’s Torture
By DAVID BARSTOW | May 26, 1999
Abner Louima’s lawsuit against the city ended with in a settlement of $8.75 million, the largest police brutality settlement in New York City history.
JUSTIN A. VOLPE ADMITTED YESTERDAY THAT he rammed a stick into Abner Louima’s rectum and then thrust it in his face, an act, the police officer acknowledged, intended to humiliate and intimidate the handcuffed Haitian immigrant.
“If you tell anybody about this, I’ll find you and kill you,” Mr. Volpe said he told Mr. Louima moments after the Aug. 9, 1997, assault in the restroom of the 70th Precinct station house in Brooklyn.
“If you tell anybody about this, I’ll find you and kill you,” Mr. Volpe said.
By admitting guilt, Mr. Volpe hoped to be spared a life sentence for an assault that cast a shadow on the entire New York Police Department. But while he offered grim details about acts he has long denied, Mr. Volpe did not implicate any other officers by name, even though four others are still on trial in the case. As he confessed to six federal crimes, Mr. Volpe at times struggled for words when pressed to explain the forces that compelled him to torture Mr. Louima.
“When you put the stick up towards his face, having shoved it into his rectum, was a part of your effort to humiliate him?” Judge Eugene H. Nickerson of Federal District Court asked, his tone quietly insistent.
Mr. Volpe paused, unsure of himself. “I was in shock at the time, Your Honor,” he said.
The judge repeated the question. “I couldn’t believe what happened,”
Mr. Volpe said, again seeming to fumble. And then, “I was mad.”
Still unsatisfied, Judge Nickerson tried once more. “You intended to humiliate him?”
“Yes,” Mr. Volpe finally said, averting his eyes.
Mr. Volpe, 27, wept only once, at the end of the 45-minute hearing, when he said to Judge Nickerson, “Your Honor, if I could just let the record reflect I’m sorry for hurting my family.”
The judge cut him off. “You’ll get a chance to do that when you come to sentence,” he said.
Mr. Volpe wiped the tears from his eyes, and then turned and looked into the audience for his most outspoken defender, his father, Robert Volpe, a retired police detective once renowned for solving art thefts. The son managed a weak smile as guards escorted him from the courtroom.
“There are all different kinds of hell,” Robert Volpe said later. “It’s not easy seeing your son taken away.”
Cleared as Criminals, But Forever on Trial
By CLYDE HABERMAN | April 29, 2008
YOU HAD TO WONDER IF THE SETTING WAS somebody’s misguided stab at irony.
Four hours after being absolved of criminal wrongdoing, the three police detectives put on trial in the shooting death of Sean Bell stood last Friday before a battery of cameras and notebooks. The three men stood side by side in a conference room at the headquarters of their union, the Detectives’ Endowment Association. Painted on the wall behind them was the union’s circular logo. “The Greatest Detectives in the World,” it said.
Oh, really? The greatest detectives in the world.
Granted, those words were meant for the city’s detectives as a unit. No matter what they think of the judge’s not-guilty verdict few are likely to hail these three men as the greatest detectives in the city, let alone in the world.
Even the judge, Justice Arthur J. Cooperman of State Supreme Court, implied that he did not think much of their performance on that November night in 2006. Yes, he cleared them of criminal behavior. But he also referred not once but twice to “carelessness and incompetence.”
It boils down to a question of whether the city can safely, or sanely, put a gun in a police officer’s hand and send him into the streets after he displayed judgment so flawed as to reasonably meet Justice Cooperman’s standard of “carelessness and incompetence.”
The odds seem long against a finding that these are indeed the greatest detectives in the world.
The Legacy of a 41-Bullet Barrage
By DAN BARRY | February 27, 2000
THE DEATH OF AMADOU DIALLO LAST YEAR became a defining event for the New York Police Department. The shooting of the unarmed West African immigrant by four white officers spurred protests, prompted various examinations of the department’s admittedly aggressive tactics, and attracted so much attention that police officials blamed the news media for what they said was a sudden timidity among the rank-and-file.
On Friday, a jury capped a riveting and often tense trial by finding the four officers not guilty of murder and several lesser charges.
The Diallo family, dismayed by the verdict, is expected to file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city. The state attorney general’s office is critically examining the department’s “stop-and-frisk” policy. The officers may still face internal misconduct charges. The United States attorney for the Southern District of New York will review the evidence to determine whether the shooting violated federal civil rights laws.
And the Street Crime Unit has gone from being a jewel in the Giuliani administration’s law-enforcement efforts to serving as Exhibit A in critics’ charges that aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics violate basic rights; today, the unit bears only a trace resemblance to what it was when four of its members killed Mr. Diallo. The days of an elite corps of plainclothes officers roaming the city to prevent crime and seize guns appear to be over.
Knapp Panel Describes Police Corruption as “Extensive”
By DAVID BURNHAM | December 28, 1972
THE KNAPP COMMISSION ASSERTS IN ITS final report that high New York police officials ignored federal information that some of their men were suspected murderers, extortionists and heroin dealers.
The commission said its investigators had discovered evidence of three separate instances in which police officials, including former First Deputy Police Commissioner John F. Walsh, had failed to investigate allegations of serious misconduct made by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
The commission also concluded that as of October 1971, police corruption in New York City was “an extensive, department-wide phenomenon, indulged in to some degree by a sizable majority of those on the force.”
The commission report said that City Council President Sanford D. Garelik, formerly the chief inspector, had told the commission “that as a field commander he had received gratuities from businessmen he came in contact with in the course of his duties.”
“Instead of returning these gifts or asking that they not be sent,” the commission report said, “he stated he attempted to respond by giving return gifts of equal value.”
A spokesman for Mr. Garelik, who was in Florida on vacation, said the commission’s “use of the word gratuity is unfair and misleading.”
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“There certainly was nothing morally or ethically wrong in his actions,” he added.
In a separate case, the commission concluded that Jay Kriegel, one of Mayor Lindsay’s closest associates; Arnold G. Fraiman, city commissioner of investigation from 1966 to 1968 and now a state supreme court justice; and Commissioner Walsh all failed to act when informed of widespread bribery among plainclothes policemen responsible for enforcing the gambling laws in the Bronx.
The commission did not offer a judgment about whether Mayor Lindsay was culpable for the inaction. But the commission did conclude that “it is clear that the mayor’s office did not see to it that the specific charges of corruption” made by one policeman—Frank Serpico—“were investigated.”
For Mr. Fix-It, A New Scandal To Mop Up
By AL BAKER | January 26, 2008
IN THIS STREET MATRIX OF MANAGEMENT styles, Deputy Chief Joseph J. Reznick might well come under the heading “Dominant/Aggressive,” maybe even “Hostile.”
Now, the arrest of four narcotics officers in Brooklyn has given the Police Department a black eye, and Chief Reznick, a veteran whose name pops up in all manner of big cases, has been brought in to clean up a scandal that has caused 80 drug prosecutions to collapse.
The chief would not discuss the drugs-for-informants scandal in Brooklyn South Narcotics, nor what his plans were in dealing with it. But he spoke at length about his career, and his outlook.
Chief Reznick joined the department in December 1973 after a stint in the Navy. More remarkable than his longevity is the number of times he has been in the middle of the latest hot issue at the department.
He was involved in the investigation of the torture and killing of Jonathan M. Levin, a teacher, in his Manhattan apartment in 1997; the murder of Irene Silverman in her Upper East Side town house in 1998; and the murder of the girl they called “Baby Hope,” a 5-year-old whose body was found packed into a picnic cooler off the Henry Hudson Parkway. He also led the chase for the suspects in the killing of Officer Russel Timoshenko, 23. They were captured off Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania.
It’s been just a few days since he got the assignment to Brooklyn South Narcotics. Two narcotics officers, Detective Sean Johnstone and Officer Julio Alvarez, are accused of lying about the amount of cocaine they recovered from a suspect. Detective Johnstone was later recorded talking about withholding drugs and the practice of giving them to informants.
A subsequent inquiry led to the arrests last week of two other officers in the unit, Sgt. Michael Arenella and Officer Jerry Bowens. They are accused in court papers of taking drugs and cash they had recovered and of giving them to a confidential informant as payback.
As a result, four high-level police commanders have been transferred, and Chief Reznick has been brought in. He would say only that he’ll use “my skills, my experience, as I’ve done in the past, to make good” in Brooklyn South Narcotics.
Charges of Police Misconduct Prompt Change in Department
By ELISSA GOOTMAN | September 23, 2002
MORE THAN FIVE YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE Abner Louima became a household name in New York City, a chilling symbol of what could go wrong in a police department praised for making the city a safer, cleaner place.
Those years have been dotted with transformative events for the department. There was the case of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed black man shot on his doorstep by police officers who thought he was pulling out a gun. There were protests, as critics lumped the two cases together, and there were policy changes, as the department responded by setting up panels and committees that ensured input from black neighborhoods, and tried with modest success to recruit more black and Hispanic officers.
There was a change in leadership at City Hall, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg winning praise from many of his predecessor’s critics. And then there was Sept. 11, which took the lives of officers and cast a glow of heroism on the survivors.
“It is not the same police department that it was five years ago,” said Thomas A. Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, a criminal justice research group.
And changes, in turn, have been made, some of them in direct response to the Louima case and others stemming from events that overtook it. Allegations of police misconduct to the Civilian Complaint Review Board have declined in recent years. Last year, 4,260 complaints were filed, a figure 11 percent lower than the number of complaints received in 1997: 4,768.
And there have been other changes, like the creation of a Board of Visitors, through which teachers, lawyers and other community members review the department’s recruitment and training practices.
“It’s a gradual change that’s happened,” said Richard E. Green, a community leader in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and a member of the Board of Visitors. “They’re taking a very proactive approach, putting checks and balances in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen or when it does happen, there is a quick remedy.”
The Line of Fire Is Again Part Of the Line of Duty
By RANDY KENNEDY | March 16, 2003
Detective Rodney J. Andrews’s fellow officers served as pallbearers at his funeral service at the Elim International Fellowship Church in Brooklyn.
THEY DID NOT DIE FIGHTING A HORRIFIC ACT of international terrorism. They did not die trying to rescue thousands of people. The place where they died was not instantly recognizable around the world, nor will it ever be. It was a nondescript patch of road through a working-class Staten Island neighborhood, where last week a small tuft of paper roses sat near a chain-link fence, next to a laminated paper sign that said, “May God Bless Our Two Heroes.”
As one police lieutenant said, the deaths of the two undercover detectives felt, in an unexpected way, like a return to normal—“a very sad normal.” But as the first line-of-duty deaths in the city’s uniformed services since Sept. 11, 2001, the slayings of Detectives James V. Nemorin, 36, and Rodney J.
Andrews, 34, reminded the city of the way police officers have always died on the job and will continue to die as long as there is violence and random chance: doing the everyday, incremental, perilous work that keeps one more gun, one more criminal, off the streets.
For the public and even for officers themselves, the World Trade Center attack profoundly changed the context of line-of-duty deaths. In several interviews last week inside and outside the police department, those who talked about the detectives’ deaths said that the shootings seemed like a reminder of an older kind of reality—no less tragic than Sept. 11, but different.
“It’s a reminder of the daily terror on the streets, as opposed to the foreign terror, the daily terror that was rampant for years before 9/11,” said Eli B. Silverman, a professor of police studies at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. “The public knows that crime has gone down, but are they really aware of how that actually happens, every day, on the streets? I don’t think they are, and this is a reminder that it’s never easy.”
Police officers have of course never forgotten how hard or dangerous the job is. But they said the killings on Staten Island—the first fatal shooting of a police officer on the job since 1998—brought back, even to them, a kind of feeling they have not had in a long time. The World Trade Center attack, because it was so extraordinary, did not bring the same sense of vulnerability to some officers that a shooting in the line of duty does.
“This hit home: You know the peril, that feeling in your heart when something is about to go wrong,” said Marq Claxton, a detective in the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who worked for five years in undercover narcotics operations and knew Detective Andrews. “If you did that kind of work, you know that undercover operations are just one itchy trigger finger, one turn of emotion or fit of anger away from tragedy.”
In High Crime Neighborhoods Community Policing Has Its Limits
By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY | July 18, 1993
OFFICER MICHAEL LOPEZ WAS WALKING HIS beat in East New York, Brooklyn, recently when the bar
rage began: rocks, bottles and debris hurtled toward him from the rooftop of a housing project.
Officer Lopez ducked, ran for cover and, getting the message, established a new policy: never to walk alone near high-rises again.
As a community police officer, he is supposed to build ties and cooperation within neighborhoods to help fight crime, but in the 75th Precinct, one of the city’s most violent and a place where mistrust of the police runs high, that is no easy task.
Community policing is being phased in throughout the city, and some progress has been reported in more stable neighborhoods. But the toughest test for New York’s new crime-fighting philosophy will come in high-crime neighborhoods like East New York, where officers work in an atmosphere of fear, hostility and alienation, the kind of tension that afflicts relations between the police and minority residents throughout the country. Residents say they sense the officers’ fear, increasing the friction.
The idea behind community policing is to get officers out of squad cars and onto neighborhood streets. Many experts say the limits of this type of policing become apparent in areas like East New York, which often lack the civic cohesion that can help prevent crime.
In the 75th, 38 community police officers are divided into 26 beats throughout the six-square mile precinct. As they walk their beats, they are expected to create networks of cooperation and information-sharing among residents and solve persistent crime problems. Officers have started green thumb programs, growing cabbage and tomatoes in vacant lots where crack houses once flourished; coordinated street cleanups and, most significantly, reached out to the area’s youth in the hopes of changing their attitudes about the police.
But such efforts go only so far in East New York, which often resembles a war zone with its many charred buildings, trash-filled vacant lots and barren streets. The 75th Precinct counted 90 murders within its borders last year, second only to the 34th in Washington Heights, and the number is up sharply this year, 71 through June. Overall crime fell 3.1 percent last year but that was far below the 7.8 percent drop for the entire city.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 46