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Police Violence Seems to
Result in No Punishment
by Ginia
Bellafante
Dec. 4, 2014
The police stopped protesters from
entering the Lincoln
Tunnel after a grand jury did not indict an officer in the death of Eric Garner
on Wednesday.
When a grand jury on Staten
Island declined, on Wednesday, to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the killing
of Eric Garner, some critics blamed Staten Island
itself, easily equating it with a culture of police coddling and conservatism.
But grand juries, so willing to issue indictments in so many instances, rarely
do so in cases involving police officers who have killed civilians. And they
have failed to do so in far more liberal environments — in Manhattan,
Brooklyn and the Bronx.
The year 1999 was a horrific
one for police shootings in New York
City. On Feb. 4, Amadou Diallo was killed in the
doorway of a Bronx apartment building after
the police, mistakenly believing he was reaching into his pocket for a gun, fired
41 shots. Several months later, at the end of August, Gidone Busch, a mentally disturbed Orthodox Jewish
man, was shot a dozen times in Borough
Park in Brooklyn
by four police officers, after he struck one on the arm with a hammer. A few
days later, in September, an unarmed man named Richard Watson was fatally shot
by the police in Harlem after he fled on foot
in the wake of an accusation that he had evaded a taxi fare.
Mr. Watson’s death
represented the fifth fatal shooting by police officers in four weeks. The new
millennium would get underway with the killing of Patrick Dorismond in March 2000 after an
undercover narcotics agent shot him outside a Midtown Manhattan bar; he too was
without a weapon. None of the police officers involved in the Busch, Watson or Dorismond cases faced criminal
charges. Officers in the Diallo case were acquitted. Thirteen years after the
shooting, the Police Department gave one of them, Kenneth Boss, the right to use his gun again.
In the current moment, police
violence, like campus sexual assault, seems to be in a pandemic phase. Last
month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 461 felony suspects
had been killed by police officers across the country last year, the highest
figure in two decades. We are possibly, if not surely, experiencing a crisis of
manhood in which the young respond to their fears in a time of rising
insecurity with a concomitant blast of brutality. Darren Wilson, who shot
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.;
Officer Pantaleo; and Peter Laing, the police officer who killed Akai Gurley
last month in the Pink Houses in Brooklyn, are
all in their 20s.
Whatever the collective
psychological causes, it is almost certain that the absence of real repercussions
impedes restraint.
“If you believe in deterrence
theory,” as Jeffrey A. Fagan, a Columbia
University law professor
who specializes in policing, put it to me, “then you believe that people will
refrain from wrongdoing if they believe that punishment is real. But the legal
system is incapable of creating the same kind of deterrent effects for police
officers.” Right now, there would appear to be no obvious downside to the use
of excessive force beyond personal upset and dislocation.
Apart from that are the broad
latitude and deference that prosecutors give police officers in these cases.
“The way the questioning often goes, it allows the officer to set forward a
narrative that gives a series of justifications for his actions,” Professor
Fagan said. That narrative has to be challenged, and in many cases it isn’t.
As anyone who has watched
“Law & Order” knows, the relationship between police officers and
prosecutors is typically steeped in fealty, which is why advocates of police
reform have called for independent prosecutors to be assigned to cases
involving potential criminal misconduct on the part of the police.
“Is there hand-in-hand
complicity? I believe there is,” Jeffry L. Emdin told me. Mr. Emdin, a former
assistant district attorney in the Bronx,
represented the family of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed teenager who was shot and
killed by a police officer, Richard Haste, two years ago. “The district
attorney’s office works daily with members of the N.Y.P.D.,” Mr. Emdin said.
“I’ve had A.D.A.s vouch for the credibility of officers coming under civil
rights violations,” he told me, referring to prosecutors who could be expected
to bring charges.
In one instance he had a
client who alleged that a police officer broke his nose in a precinct house.
“The D.A.’s office said, ‘No, no, he couldn’t have done that.’ ”
The city believes that
requiring police officers to wear cameras, a program that is to begin
immediately, will help reduce instances of transgression. It’s hard to absorb
the logic of that after the Garner decision, given that the existence of a
video demonstrating the use of a chokehold on Mr. Garner failed to persuade the
grand jury that Officer Pantaleo’s actions even demanded a criminal trial.
In a television appearance on
Wednesday night, the city’s public advocate, Letitia James, called upon Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo to push for independent prosecutors in these cases. Asked about
this the next day, Governor Cuomo, whose initial
response to the Garner decision was relatively dispassionate,
deflected. “I think we should look at the whole system,” he said. “I don’t
think there’s any one answer.”
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