What the NYPD wants us to see
Mayor de Blasio — who often seems afraid of his own police department even as he mouths platitudes on its behalf — explained again on Friday that the officers who shot and killed Saheed Vassell in Crown Heights more than two weeks ago haven’t been identified because “it’s not our practice to release the names of officers upfront, and I think that’s out of a sense of wanting to protect everyone involved.”
As the NYPD has trickled out the officers’ racial backgrounds, Vassell’s criminal record, selected video and 911 footage showing the bipolar 34-year-old scaring neighborhood residents as he wielded a piece of pipe as though it were a gun, and then distant and hard-to-see footage of the shooting itself, de Blasio has kept repeating that “we’re going to be as transparent as we can in this situation, understanding there will a formal and full investigation.” Whatever that means. He’s been suggestive enough about what that means that a spokesperson for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman pushed back days after the shooting, to make plain that “Our office played no role in the NYPD’s decision to release partial footage concerning the Vassell case last week, and we have not objected to the NYPD’s release of video footage of the officers.” But de Blasio can’t seem to help himself. “There is obviously an ongoing investigation by the NYPD and an independent ongoing investigation by the attorney general,” he told Brian Lehrer on Friday. “If the attorney general’s investigation results in some kind of charge, of course there would be a trial. Names would be public at that point. The NYPD has a different procedure.”
De Blasio didn’t explain that “different procedure,” but it must be new. Daniel Pantaleo’s name was released three days after he killed Eric Garner in 2014. Peter Liang’s name was released the day after he fatally shot Akai Gurley later that year. Hugh Barry’s name was released the day after he fatally shot Deborah Danner in 2016.
After Garner’s death, the NYPD under then-commissioner Bill Bratton abruptly reinterpreted a section of state law on the books for four decades to mean it could no longer disclose officer disciplinary records.
A court ruled that the new reading was wrong and those records could still be released, but the city appealed and won on appeal. Absurdly, the mayor insists that only the evil forces of Albany stopped his push this year to change the law his administration effectively made up and then fought in court to keep (and that Gov. Cuomo’s camp told The News last month the city didn’t bring up at all with them).
Thanks to de Blasio’s new secrecy, we only know that Pantaleo had a number of misconduct complaints lodged against him and that he received minimal departmental punishment in the four cases where the Civilian Complaint Review Board found he’d abused his authority because a junior staffer there leaked those records.
The whistleblower later resigned in anticipation of being fired, while Pantaleo is still a police officer, on desk duty, more than three years after a Staten Island grand jury chose not to indict him.
De Blasio Friday afternoon again blamed the delay in punishing Pantaleo on someone else, calling on the Justice Department to conclude its years of deliberation about whether or not to file civil-rights charges. The mayor has used the feds’ request that the city hold off until they reach a decision as cover for all this time, but in fact there’s nothing stopping him from just telling Jeff Sessions “no,” and acting.
Finally, there’s the breakdown of “good faith” Rory Lancman described in his letter to Commissioner James O’Neill on Wednesday after the NYPD blew by its deadline under a new law written by the councilman to post a full list of fare-beating arrests and summonses broken down by station, race, age and gender.
Lancman is using that fight as a proxy for an even bigger one, about how proactive we want policing — and particularly policing of young black men — to be in New York.
The NYPD for its part argues it was Lancman who broke “good faith” by going public with the dispute, and — the day after I reported on Lancman’s letter — put out word that arrests (mostly of repeat offenders) and summonses have plunged this year. The department told me Friday that it’s now sharing information on each station with the Council, and will be posting some of the subway data some time soon, though maybe not everything the law intended or requires.
Asked about the dispute, a City Hall spokesman said that “The NYPD has provided extensive summons and arrest data as required under the law.
“We’re confident continued conversations between the department and the councilmember will result in a more transparent policing of the subways.”
As de Blasio keeps talking “transparency,” I’ll believe it when I see through it.