The mayor’s tarred police reform record
Mayor de Blasio is misleading New Yorkers about police reform and his administration’s token efforts to ensure accountability for the NYPD killing my son Ramarley Graham.
Ramarley was killed in 2012, when police officers who had followed him on the street, wrongly claiming they thought he had a gun, busted into our home and one of them shot him dead.
For over five years, I’ve been forced to fight to expose the wideranging misconduct surrounding my son’s killing.
The de Blasio administration says the NYPD disciplinary process worked in the case of Richard Haste, the officer who pulled the trigger. That’s totally disingenuous. The process was dysfunctional and incomplete by design.
The mayor has disrespectfully tried to portray me as clouded by grief, but I’m clearer than he’ll ever be about police accountability. I was one of the many family members of New Yorkers killed by police who moved Gov. Cuomo to enact a special prosecutor for police killings in 2015, even though we knew it would apply only to future cases, and not affect any of our families’ existing cases.
De Blasio was absent then — and he’s absent now on police accountability.
While the de Blasio administration claims it was aggressively and consistently pursuing accountability, newly revealed facts tell a different story. Then-Chief of Department James O’Neill and then-Commissioner Bill Bratton reportedly met with Haste as late as September to push a backroom deal for him to resign in exchange for his pension before any trial could occur, trying to sweep what happened to Ramarley under the rug.
This helps explain why Haste’s departmental trial was delayed almost a year after the federal government decided not to prosecute, forcing my family to endure this far longer than necessary.
The most recent insult came while Haste was allowed to resign on his own terms this week. Police sources have informed me that usually an officer in Haste’s position would have been suspended so he would be forced to resign under suspension pending termination. That didn’t happen.
Resignation is not the same as being fired, especially when Haste can go to another police department and once again become an officer.
Meantime, there is still no date for the departmental trials of Sgt. Scott Morris and Officer John McLoughlin, who were on the scene with Haste that day, and are the only two other officers facing NYPD charges so far. The de Blasio administration won’t even inform me of their specific charges.
There were also many other officers who engaged in misconduct on that day. But the mayor has never shown any real interest in helping to uncover the truth, declining my meeting requests and never even acknowledging the content of my letters. I’ve been forced to file an extensive Freedom of Information request to access information, much of which the NYPD continues to withhold.
The mayor should release all of that information about the misconduct surrounding my son’s killing, and should also release Haste’s departmental trial report and full Civilian Complaint Review Board record. Since Haste is no longer employed by the NYPD, de Blasio shouldn’t keep hiding behind his misinterpretation of state law to shield Haste.
Finally, New Yorkers need the mayor to engage in real solutions to police accountability instead of public relations rhetoric. The fact that Delrawn Small, Deborah Danner and Ariel Galarza were killed and too many New Yorkers continue to be brutalized after the NYPD implemented new training is clear proof that abusive policing is still a systemic probelm.
The same racial disparities in policing that led to my son being targeted for being a black teenager remain unchanged by this administration. NYPD-reported stop-and-frisks may be down, but in almost every meaningful respect, de Blasio is leaving black and Latino communities as vulnerable to police violence as they were before he won the office on the backs of our pain and votes.
We need concrete changes, not politically expedient solutions. Communities have been demanding an end to broken windows policing; passage of the Right to Know Act legislation; meaningful, swift and thorough accountability for police abuses in our neighborhoods, and full transparency by the NYPD rather than misuse of state law to conceal police misconduct.
It says a lot that Mayor de Blasio refuses to truly support any one of them.