Madden’s silence endures
Mayor Patrick Madden of Troy deserves credit for working to build bridges between police and activists ahead of the city’s June 7 rally in response to the killing of George Floyd. That includes his pre-rally statement that he would “take a knee in solidarity with the peaceful protesters in humility and empathy and in acknowledgment that collectively we have not lived up to our very own ideals and with a personal commitment to strive harder.”
That’s a worthy sentiment, albeit expressed in appalling run-on fashion.
But talk is cheap. Unmentioned in Madden’s letter were any of the reasons why Troy’s Black residents might have problems with its police force. There was certainly no mention of Edson Thevenin, who was shot dead after driving away from a DUI stop in April 2016.
A year ago Sunday, the Times Union’s Brendan J. Lyons broke the news that Troy’s internal affairs unit had in September 2018 submitted a report on the incident that had never been disclosed to attorneys for Thevenin’s widow, who is suing the city in federal court. In response, Madden’s legal team pointed to the state law known as 50-a — which until this month barred the release of police disciplinary records — and demanded to know who had leaked the information to the dead man’s wife.
The federal judge overseeing the case properly observed that state law doesn’t swing much weight in a federal suit, and in August put the 69-page report in the court record for the public to see. That document concluded that Sgt. Randall French had improperly forced Thevenin’s car off the road, causing it to crash into a concrete barrier, and later lied about it. The report, prepared by Capt. Joseph Centanni, also presented evidence contradicting French’s claim that he had shot Thevenin as the officer was trapped between his cruiser and the suspect’s vehicle.
Forced to explain why French had faced no discipline, the city’s lawyers revealed that police had decided to seek a fairly unprecedented second opinion on Centanni’s report. They wouldn’t initially reveal much about the resulting memo beyond the fact that it took issue with the report’s findings. The city ultimately disclosed that the follow-up review was conducted by Michael D. Ranalli, a former Glenville police chief and lawyer now working as a private consultant; he was recommended to Madden by the police.
In nearly a year since the existence of Ranalli’s memo came to light, Madden has refused to release it, using as an excuse its status as attorney-client work product. The mayor has insisted that he wants to see the case resolved in court. On Friday, his office said he hadn’t changed his mind despite the calls for greater transparency on police misconduct that have echoed across the
country for weeks.
Madden’s decision denies the families of Thevenin and French, as well as the rest of the citizens of Troy, the chance to assess whether the police were justified in ignoring Centanni’s damning report and sparing French from discipline. The public deserves to know whether Ranalli offered a sound defense of French’s actions that will help to clear his reputation, served up a taxpayerfunded whitewash, or authored something in between. But leaving it locked away serves absolutely no one except the city’s lawyers, who are pressing to have the suit tossed.
In a sometimes tense appearance last year before the Times Union’s editorial board, Madden bristled at the suggestion that withholding the Ranalli memo was in any way a cover-up. He also revealed for the first time that he had cringed after hearing Troy’s then-police Chief John Tedesco essentially exonerate French at a news conference in the immediate aftermath of Thevenin’s death. Madden told the editorial board that he had expressed his misgivings about those remarks to the chief in private — which would have surely been a great comfort to Thevenin’s family if the mayor had seen fit to let anyone know about it.
Madden also unburdened himself about his having been, well, very dissatisfied with the handling of the case by Rensselaer County District Attorney Joel Abelove, whose sloppy and high-speed decision to put the matter before a grand jury pretty much guaranteed that neither the dead man nor the officer would see anything like durable, transparent justice.
It must have been a relief for the mayor to get all this off his chest after three years of utter silence.
French died in April at age 39 after being diagnosed with COVID-19. I heard from many readers who were furious with the Times Union for mentioning the Thevenin case in articles about his illness and death, and I have no doubt they will be aggrieved to see him mentioned in this column. People praised French as a faithful friend and loving parent, and no one of good conscience would dispute those opinions.
But people who knew Edson Thevenin said the same things about him. The tragedy is that both men are dead, each brought down by one of the two afflictions that have remade America in the season just ended.
It’s possible for basically decent people to make bad mistakes, even when those consequences are not just bad but deadly. What’s absolutely unacceptable, however, is for public officials to perpetuate a system that tries to paper over those mistakes, and therefore makes the next death even more likely.