COPS SEE NO EVIL
‘Giving us a break’ on day of violence
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton on Monday said he saw no need to ban parties ahead of the West IndianAmerican Day Parade — even though four people were shot and two others were stabbed during this year’s festivities.
The city’s top cop called the violence “unfortunate” but insisted it was “no reason to not go forward with the events.”
“It’s something that this community wants to have, and it wants to have it in a safe manner,” he said.
Bratton said police brass have “very intimate relationships” with parade organizers, community leaders and local politicians, and hold “a significant number of meetings” ahead of the parties.
“Each year, we try to make them safer, and each year the community works even more closely with us to that end,” Bratton added.
In addition to the preparade violence, revelers openly smoked weed and drank booze as the annual procession made its way along Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn on Monday afternoon.
Clouds of pungent smoke wafted through the crowd, and two young men — one wearing a Jamaicanflag bandanna, the other wearing a sash made of American and Bahamian flags — were spotted rolling up and lighting marijuana cigarettes.
An older woman covered her nose as several young men shared a joint, dancing and blowing smoke into the air.
“A lot is happening that isn’t supposed to be happening,” she said, a look of disgust plain on her face.
One young man was also seen pouring Hennessy cognac into an icedtea bottle, then doling it out into plastic cups. Three pals who were spotted drinking brown liquid from clear plastic cups as they cavorted along the parade route admitted that their beverage of choice was the same type of booze.
One of them claimed that cops were turning a blind eye to the blatant lawbreaking.
“I’m allowed to drink and smoke,” said Nevin Budhu, 21. “The cops see us and they don’t say anything . . . They are giving us a break because this is the one time we get to enjoy ourselves in public.”
NYPD sources said supervisors have traditionally urged restraint when dealing with paradegoers, with one cop saying the brass “forbid us from making arrests, no matter what we saw, because they didn’t want riots.”
“They’ve always downplayed the violence by saying shootings weren’t paraderelated, unless someone was shot on the route, on a float. Then one year, someone was shot off a float,” said the cop, referring to an incident from 2003.
Cops routinely confiscate booze from revelers at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, but detectivesunion chief Michael Palladino said he was ordered not to do the same thing at the West Indian-American Day Parade.
“In my 36 years with the department, that’s the only parade where I was told to look the other way,” Palladino said. “The political theme of decriminalization started at that parade decades ago.”
A retired NYPD cop said, “No one in their right mind wants to do that detail.”
“It’s the worst event of the year, in terms of violence, and it goes on for days,” the excop said.
Additional reporting by Kirstan Conley in Albany