DA: No charges for cop attackers
Union rages at inaction vs. subway ‘mopes’
Attacking a cop has joined fare-beating and public urination on the list of subway misbehavior Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr. won’t bother prosecuting.
Officer Syed Ali — an Army combat vet who served in Iraq and Afghanistan — had no trouble fending off five homeless vagrants with his baton and his feet as they came at him one by one on Sunday night. The attack, captured on video, was viewed 4 million times on Twitter.
As of Tuesday night, none of the men were to be prosecuted, said Danny Frost, a spokesman for Vance.
Frost said the problem is that the police never charged the men with attacking Ali.
“When people are arrested for attacking officers, we prosecute them. These men were not arrested for attacking an officer,” Frost said.
“They were arrested for sleeping on the floor of a subway station – a rules violation, not a crime. We have not prosecuted this violation since March 2016 under a policy jointly established with the police commissioner and mayor."
That agreement also curbed prosecutions for fare-beating, public urination, and a slew of other minor offenses. It has since been replicated citywide.
The decision not to charge the men outraged Ali’s union, which placed the blame on the district attorney’s office.
“There’s no telling how much damage these mopes would have done to that courageous police officer had he not been equipped to handle them. Had it gone the other way we might have had a seriously injured or dead police officer instead,” said Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.
“It’s wrong that they were not charged for attacking him. The district attorney’s job is to prosecute crimes, not to act like a social advocate.”
Even though the men will not be charged, Mayor de Blasio on Tuesday said the city must not countenance attacks on police or other uniformed workers.
“What extraordinary professionalism and bravery by NYPD Officer Syed Ali,” de Blasio tweeted. “Attacking our men and women in uniform won’t ever be tolerated.”
Ali’s actions also earned him a citation from City Councilman Chaim Deutsch (D-Brooklyn), who visited Ali at the NYPD Transit Task Force base in north Brooklyn. “Why were the attackers released? Deutsch asked on Twitter. “Were they offered mental health treatment and shelter, or are they back out on the streets, free to assault somebody else, or worse? Many unanswered questions.”
One of the alleged attackers returned Tuesday night to the scene of the fight, the East Broadway F train stop on the Lower East Side. He crawled under a turnstile and did a somersault, and confirmed to reporters that he was one of the men in the fracas. He then ran off.
Ali encountered the men at the station Sunday night when a woman approached him and said a group of homeless men were harassing her. He told them to leave and they “approached him aggressively,” police sources said.
Cell phone video captured what happened next — Ali used a baton and his feet to keep the men at bay as they came at him.
One of the men lurched at him and fell onto the tracks. Ali may have saved the man’s life by calling for MTA officials to cut power to the third rail -- before he radioed for backup.
Police took five homeless men into custody — Oseas Garcia, 32; Juan Munez, 27; Raul Ruiz, 29; Elisoe Alvarez Santos, 36, and Leobardo Alvarado, 31, at first processing them as intoxicated emotionally disturbed people.
After the fight, one of the men mugged for a camera from his hospital bed, belting out a tune, video obtained by the Daily News shows.
All five returned to the station after their release. Police sources say vagrants often drink and get high at the section of the platform where Ali found them.
Ali’s handling of the incident won praise from the NYPD Muslim Officers Society, of which he is a member.
“We’d like to commend him for his use of restraint where he made sure that he utilized the minimum (force) necessary,” said Capt. Adeel Rana, society president..” It might have something to do with his military training but the majority of it is him being calm under pressure situations.”
Ali, an Army reservist, has been deployed to Kuwait and Afghanistan and saw combat in Iraq in 2008.
He also made headlines last year for speaking out against racial profiling after he was detained at Kennedy Airport for extra screening in April 2017 when he returned home from Istanbul and threatened with arrest when he asked how long he’d be held, he told The New York Times at the time.
“I feel like my rights were violated,” Ali told the newspaper shortly after the incident.