A modern New York fable

Asegment of New Yorkers holds virtually any action by the NYPD short of delivering babies to be oppressive. Some of those comrades in arms booed First Deputy Police Commissioner Benjamin Tucker at the annual conference of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. His offense was to suggest that facts do matter. After audience member Abdul Melik yelled out that he had been with a 15-year-old who had been stopped by police on the way to the event, moderator Lawrence O’Donnell asked Tucker:

“What would you say to a 15-year-old boy who has literally been stopped and frisked?” Appropriately, Tucker replied: “Well, I don’t know the circumstances” — at which point the audience booed — “it would be helpful if I heard from him.”

Teen Christopher Nunez then took a microphone and told of an episode in the subway system:

“I was going on the train and I didn’t have a MetroCard, so my sister helped me get on when she swiped with me, and I was sitting there and the cop called me and I went up to him. . . . I told him I got locked up for this before in the 44th Precinct.”

Tucker — who’d previously said that, as “a kid who grew up in Brooklyn” he “knows what it’s like to be stopped and frisked for no reason” — now said that changing the NYPD “takes time.”

He continued: “I was that young man, 46 years ago, 47 years ago. And so, it’s not that I don’t get it. I do get it.”

Nunez then resumed his story, reporting that the officer “said if I was 16, he would have locked me up” before sending the boy on his way.

After the panel, reporters asked Nunez how, exactly, his sister had “helped” him. He clarified that she had swiped her card and that they had squeezed through the turnstile together.

“You know that’s illegal,” Melik, who mentors the teen, told Nunez.

“Yeah, I know. . . . But, we were trying to hurry up,” Nunez answered.

“So, stop right there, because now you’re incriminating yourself. So, the conversation is over for that,” Melik told his charge.

Asked by a reporter if he was complaining that the officer had been discourteous, Nunez said, “I got nothing to say.”

The facts that mattered were that the cop had not stopped Nunez on a whim and had not frisked him at all. Instead, the cop had witnessed the commission of fare-beating, yet let the young man continue on his trip. By all rights, convention-goers should have hailed the cop as a hero.