Justice delayed, not denied
‘What happened should not have happened. The actions taken by the NYPD were wrong, plain and simple,” Commissioner Jimmy O’Neill said Thursday, nearly 50 years after the uprising that fol- lowed the department’s degrading raid on the Stonewall Inn and less than 24 hours after Council Speaker Corey Johnson challenged him to finally apologize.
“The actions and the laws were discriminatory and oppressive, and for that, I apologize,” he said. “I vow to the LGBTQ community that this would never happen in the NYPD in 2019. We have, and we do, embrace all New Yorkers.”
As it happened, O’Neill gave his frank if overdue apology (The News in 2016 offered an apology of its own for its sneering, homophobic coverage at the time) on the same day that the badly overdue departmental trial for Daniel Pantaleo, the officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner nearly five years ago, concluded.
Whatever verdict that administrative judge reaches for Pantaleo, who’s
remained on the force on desk duty, the decision is finally up to the commissioner and his boss, the mayor, who have hidden behind a long delayed federal investigation to put off any accounting for a killing that shocked the city.
It feels like a moment of overdue reckoning here, as the district attorney’s race in Queens has been defined by calls for reforming that office and even transforming the role of a prosecutor, and as activists, prompted many years after the fact by a Netflix dramatization of the so-called Central Park Five’s wrongful convictions, are calling for the reopening of decades-old cases in Manhattan.
(Notably, Patty Quillin, the wife of Netflix’s CEO, has been a big-money backer of Tiffany Cabán, a public defender surging in the Queens DA race.)
The danger is always that today’s corrections are tomorrow’s mistakes.
If police and prosecutors are to some measure a victim of their own success, as police violence and unjust convictions stand out more when there’s less overall crime and violence, that’s fundamentally a good thing.
Modern policing of the sort embraced by O’Neill and before him Bill Bratton — the commissioner pushed out of a more violent New York City by Mayor Rudy Giuliani after he was seen as taking too much of the credit for the drop in crime and who, returning under de Blasio to a far safer city, showed he could reform policing while keeping crime down — aspires, however imperfectly, to the nine principles supposedly laid out in the 19th century by Sir Robert Peele, including:
Reflecting on this now — who and what each of us is demanding protection from, the price of that protection and the need for uniformed, armed public to enforce it — rather than passively accepting the laws and orders that were already there is the way to avert apologies for “wrong actions, plain and simple” in the decades to come.