![]() Police victims, clockwise from top left: Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Alberta Spruill, Timothy Stansbury, Jr. |
When I heard that an unarmed black man had been shot by a white police officer in Brooklyn, my immediate reaction was probably similar to that of many New Yorkers: “Here we go again.” I was saddened by the news, but I was not shocked. I have represented over 100 victims of police misconduct in my career as an attorney. I know that for every outrage that makes it into the newspaper or into the courtroom, there are a good number more that never get reported at all.
The story of 19-year-old Timothy Stansbury, Jr., an innocent young man shot without cause, has joined those of Amadou Diallo, Alberta Spruill, Eleanor Bumpurs and Patrick Dorismond as illustrations that something is wrong with police procedures and practices. Stansbury left his elderly grandmother’s apartment at about 1 a.m. on Saturday, January 24. He was walking up the stairs to the roof in order to cross over to another building in the same housing development; people in this development regularly used the roof as a passageway between buildings. But the sight of Stansbury in the stairwell startled Richard Neri, a police officer who was patrolling the roof. He fired his weapon at Stansbury, killing him. A Brooklyn grand jury later cleared Neri of any criminal liability.
Less than 24 hours after I first heard of the killing on the news, I was asked to represent the Stansburys. I accepted, and am now assisting the Stansburys in a lawsuit filed against New York City.
For what we assert are violations of Stansbury’s civil rights, we are asking for $600 million. A judge and jury can order the police department to pay that amount, but they cannot tell the police department that it needs to re-examine its practices. We hope that by hitting the city in its pocketbook, we will force the police department to wake up and look at these chronic problems.
It is easy to think that this story – a young man, going to school, working, who was shot on his way to meet friends at a party -- is an exception. But while publicized cases such as Stansbury’s stand out because they are so blatant, they are hardly isolated events. New York City could significantly reduce the number of these unnecessary, and occasionally tragic, cases of police misconduct by reforming certain practices within the police department:
In the late 1980s, I represented a black woman who said that she had been harassed and then arrested by a white police officer after he pulled her over in Clinton Hill. The woman, a PhD student at the time, was driving a BMW. The case would have been entirely her word against his, except that his partner had also witnessed the incident. During the confrontation, my client had actually called on this man to take note of how she was being treated.
When I questioned the officer’s partner, however, he gave me what I call the "Standard Police Answer": He told me, very politely, that he could not recall anything that had happened. Such forgetfulness is common in police cases, as officers try to avoid saying anything that would get other cops in trouble.
During my investigation for this case, I spoke to several officers who told me, in confidence, that the man involved had a tendency to pull over black people in expensive cars. Often the justification for these traffic stops would be minor or non-existent violations. Had they communicated this to their commanders previously, it could have been dealt with easily through the force’s own disciplinary procedures, instead of in the courts. And at least one woman would not have had this experience.
Breaking down the “blue wall of silence” is not necessarily easy; cops are strongly discouraged from speaking out against other cops. This is the wrong message to send; police officers should realize that they aren’t helping anybody when they cover for bad cops.
Last year, Alberta Spruill, a career civil servant, died of a heart attack when police officers threw a flash grenade into her house while serving a search warrant. Sadly, they had the wrong apartment. Many were shocked, but others, myself included, were not surprised. Cases like this only become newsworthy when the victim dies.
I am representing another civil servant, working in law enforcement, who was handcuffed, naked, on the floor of her apartment for three hours while police officers tore it apart looking for drugs. As in Spruill’s case, they had the wrong address.
These two stories are not directly related, but they may indicate a pattern of faulty police work. I do not have the data necessary to make definite conclusions about systematic police failures. But the Corporation Counsel, the city’s law firm, does.
The Corporation Counsel represents New York City police officers and the police department every time they get sued. Surely it should be able to discern patterns of problems within the police department. Issuing a report examining such findings would be a good first step toward addressing many of the problems that the police department has in dealing with the citizens of the city.
Interactions between white police officers and black and Hispanic New Yorkers end too often in tragedy. Most of us are familiar with the more outrageous examples, cases in which the police often make farfetched claims that they perceived a threat to their safety. In examining these cases, we have to take into account the element they all have in common: race.
I am not suggesting that all white police officers are racist. But many white officers are assigned to patrol communities that they have no understanding of. Often these are minority neighborhoods. When they patrol such areas, white police officers are overly nervous and prone to make very bad judgments about what is or is not a threat.
If you talk to older retired New York City police officers, they will tell you that when they walked a regular beat, they became part of the community. They knew the merchants, the schools, the families that lived in the neighborhood. They knew where the problematic areas in the neighborhood were, and they knew who was involved in criminal activity.
The neighborhood cop on the beat may not be a reasonable expectation anymore, but the police department has to keep up with changes, in a city that is constantly evolving.
This means constantly sensitizing police officers to the neighborhoods in which they work. Black and Latino officers who patrol what we call inner-city neighborhoods aren’t usually involved in cases where innocent civilians are shot or killed. In large part, that is because these officers grew up learning the subtleties and nuances of such neighborhoods.
There are probably officers from every neighborhood in the city on the police force. Let them tell their colleagues about what they might experience, and what to look for.
The most tragic – and high profile – cases of police misconduct are those in which officers make bad decisions with deadly weapons.
There are cases where police have to use force; training officers to use good judgment in these instances is essential.
Eleanor Bumpurs – an elderly, obese, emotionally disturbed woman – was killed when a police officer shot her with a shotgun. Bumpurs was wielding a knife, there is no doubt about that. But this was not a woman who moved like a halfback; she could probably have been restrained by the group of five or six police officers who confronted her the day of her death.
Even if the use of weapons was necessary, the officers were armed with billy clubs and handguns, which could have been used to disable Bumpurs without killing her.
Yet the weapon that the police chose was a shotgun – which any hunter will tell you is a kill weapon. Better weapons training, in this case, could have prevented a death while dealing with a potentially dangerous situation.
Could changes in police training have saved the life of Timothy Stansbury, Jr.?
Definitely.
If Richard Neri had known, for instance, that the roof he was patrolling was a commonly used passageway, he wouldn’t have been so shocked to see Stansbury. If he had been trained to not keep his finger on the trigger of his weapon, he probably would not have shot him.
Kenneth Ramseur is an attorney in New York City
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Questioning Police Statistics For Crime and Cases Of Misconduct
City officials seem more skeptical than concerned over charges that some police commanders may have downgraded or simply not reported crimes in order to meet numerical targets set by top police department officials for reducing crime. The suspicions were brought forward last month by Newsday for one precinct and repeated forcefully by a major police union alleging a department-wide problem.
But the allegations -- along with the silence over another set of numbers, the substantial increase in documented and substantiated complaints about police misconduct -- show how numbers can add up to more, or less, than one might expect when trying to size up the quality of policing in New York.
A Case Study?
Though long whispered about among skeptics with little faith in the police department to begin with, the most recent allegations about underreporting crime surfaced with a report by Newsday examining the 50th precinct, in the Bronx.
That storynoted that while crime had decreased nearly 26 percent during the three-year leadership of Deputy Inspector Thomas DiRusso, there was an 11 percent increase in crime since the January departure of DiRusso to head one of two the narcotics divisions in Brooklyn.
Newsday pointed to several incidents that occurred on DiRusso’s watch to suggest an underreporting of crimes: an officer disciplined for allegedly forging a complainant’s name in order to downgrade a grand larceny to a petit larceny (the complainant later disputedthis characterization) ; interviews with two people who said police responded to their complaints in person but did not write a report; and, after a rash of reports from delivery drivers that they were targets for robbery led to a stationhouse meeting, the way DiRusso threatened the delivery drivers with summonses for riding their bicycles on the sidewalk.
Two days after the story was published, leaders for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association called a press conference. Union president Patrick Lynch asserted that the problem was endemic to the department, and called on Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to conduct a thorough investigation.
“It is a truth that is widely known by members of the department," Lynch reportedly said, "and now we have to see if the police commissioner has the courage to face the truth and do what is right for the City of New York."
Police regularly subject crime reports to an internal audit, and last June admitted that 203 crimes had been improperly downgraded in Manhattan’s 10th precinct. But in this case, police officials have sharply denied the accusations, pointing to audits that showed no wrongdoing. Police officials instead have accused Lynch of targeting DiRusso because the deputy inspector had transferred a union delegate. Meanwhile, the union claims that that officer was transferred after taking a stand against the underreporting of crime in the precinct.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg also scoffed at the comments by Lynch, calling them outrageous. “You can’t have it both ways,” said Bloomberg reportedly. “You can’t have a billboardin Times Square claiming you’re doing such a great job and therefore need a raise, and then…claim that the success of the NYPD is inflated.”
An Ever-Moving Target
The union has been fighting Kelly and the Bloomberg administration for months, publicly calling for the resignation of Kelly for the way he publicly said the shooting of unarmed teen Timothy Stansbury Jr. was “apparently unjustified” before a departmental investigation could be conducted.
In their latest criticism of top department officials, the PBA are seeking to highlight shrinking police department personnel, which since 2000 have dipped by about 4,000 officers to 37,000.
“We’ve reached a point today where because of a significant loss of personnel in our department we are unable to fight crime successfully, and yet the bureaucracy doesn’t want to admit this,” said Albert O’Leary, communications director of the police union.
The controversy also highlights possible shortcomings of the Compstat systemfor tracking crime, which, despite its ubiquity, is not without its detractors.
O’Leary said that precinct commanders were under “tremendous pressure” to reach managerial targets for reducing crime. Compstat simply doesn’t take into account the law diminishing returns, said O’Leary, something top departmental officials have failed to incorporate when evaluating department performance.
“I honestly believe, if [former Commissioner William Bratton] was still commissioner…there would be adjustments made,” said O’Leary.
O’Leary promised that the story is not going to go away, with the union continuing to speak out on the issue “over the next few weeks, as our officers come out with hard and incontrovertible evidence.”
And as for residents or those thinking of moving into a new neighborhood using Compstat numbers to gauge safety, O’Leary had this to say: “Don’t live your life based on numbers like the police department does.”
More Complaints Means…Well, More Complaints
If fewer crimes reported may not mean fewer crimes, what does an increase in complaints about police misconduct mean? According to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, just about anything.
Despite releasing a report in January that showed 5,581 people filed complaints against police officers, an increase of 969 from the previous year, the review board maintains that the numbers don’t necessarily point to widespread police misconduct.
“It’s not a proportional equation.” said Ray Patterson, noting that specific incidents can lead to spikes in complaints, such as anti-war rallies last February. Commissioners on the board have also noted that the introduction of the 311 system for reporting complaints may have also contributed to the increase in complaints.
Christopher Dunn, associate legal director the New York Civil Liberties Union, disagrees. “When complaints over the course of three years increase significantly, that certainly suggests something significant is happening.” Substantiation rates have also increased from year to year.
But Bill Kuntz, a commissioner for the review board, noted during a February meeting(In PDF Format) that during the 1992 “Dirty 30” scandal in which more than 30 officers from the 30th Precinct in Harlem were accused of stealing drugs and cash and taking bribes, complaints about police misconduct were actually going down, citywide and in that precinct.
Kuntz railed against both the police and those from the civil liberties communities who seek to use the numbers as proof of either widespread problems or exemplary performance.
“Life is more complicated than that,” Kuntz said. Of course, the department is currently facing a corruption inquiry focusing on as many as 10 officers accused of taking drug money
Patterson said that the review board simply doesn’t have the resources to undertake the “social science” project to analyze its own data.
So why release the data publicly?
“We’re duty bound by law to report to the mayor,” Patterson said flatly.
 Beginning in 1997, Tammy Auer’s supervisor at the Sanitation Department made inappropriate sexual comments to her, including the suggestion that they have a baby together. Eventually he began to touch her and threaten that he would fire her. When she secured another assignment, he followed her. Auer resigned and filed a complaint with the United States Equal Opportunity Commission, which upheld her charges.
The next year, Tonja McGhee was assigned to do maintenance work at the New York City Housing Authority. For a while, she was engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with her supervisor. When she terminated the relationship, the supervisor falsely reported to higher-ups that McGhee was not doing her work. Following that, he ordered her to undress. McGhee’s complaints were ignored and she, too, filed a complaint with the federal commission. As in Auer’s case, the commission found reasonable cause to accept the truth of the allegations and referred the charges to the United States Department of Justice.
What these women had in common besides their harassment is that they were participating in the city’s “Work Experience Program,” and there was a question whether they were employees or not, and whether they were thus entitled to federal protection when sexually harassed. They were also part of a case that asked the federal courts to decide.
Previous state and federal cases decided that such workers were not in fact employees and therefore not eligible for employee discrimination protection. (See “Do Welfare Workers Deserve Workplace Protection” by Jonathan Rosenbloom, the February 2003 law topic page update for Gotham Gazette.)
But now, In the case of United States of America v. City of New York, the United States Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit has reversed the lower federal court and decided that women workers who had complained of sexual harassment were indeed entitled to federal protection.
The opinion by Judge Rosemary Pooler said that Work Experience Program workers are protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits employment discrimination.
Attorney Timothy J. Casey, of NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, who argued the appeal for the workers said, “It is unusual for the United States Department of Justice and us to take the same position on a civil rights issue, and for the City of New York to take a contrary position.” But that is what happened here.
The parties’ contrary positions turned on whether plaintiffs’ activities constituted employment; the defendants maintain that the answer to that is no. The city argued that the plaintiffs were not employees, were not hired, did not receive wages and were therefore not eligible for the protection of Title VII. In essence, according to the defendants, the aggrieved participants had no remedies and were given no protections by Congress against sex, race or other forms of employment discrimination because they were not employed.
However, the United States Department of Justice and the various named plaintiffs argued that the plaintiffs worked, that their work was a condition of receiving public assistance, that they were paid cash and food stamps, that they received additional benefits such as childcare and transportation amounting to compensation, and that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applied to them. Federal Judge Pooler wrote, “A plaintiff who unjustifiably refused to work could lose the portion of the family’s grant attributable to her. Thus, each plaintiff had to work in order to receive her share of the family grant. A functional commonsense assessment of the plaintiffs’ alleged relationship with the city results in the conclusion that they were employees.”
The plaintiffs became Work Experience Program workers when previous welfare laws were replaced by the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) , which ended government benefits by “promoting job preparation, work, and marriage.” As political figures commonly described the new laws at the time, “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” In order for a state to receive federal this assistance, it must require work activities in exchange for paying benefits to needy families. In compliance with the new laws and mandates, each of the women in this case sought and accepted a work assignment at a New York City agency -- and each was harrassed:
Shortly after Judge Pooler’s opinion was handed down, the defendant City of New York, represented by Corporation Counsel, petitioned for a rehearing before the full 2nd Circuit bench. Although Judge Pooler’s opinion was not unanimous (one of three appellate judges dissented), such petitions are rarely granted by this court; no decision has been reached. Unless the full court does reconsider the matter and reverses, a trial will be scheduled on the charges and claims for monetary damages. Emily Jane Goodman is a New York State Supreme Court Justice