Policing in New York City Hasn’t Changed –We Have
Almost four years after the the Black Lives Matter movement rose to the national stage and filled our city’s streets with marchers, another video of police brutality is in the news but no one is marching. What’s changed in how we react to images of cops squaring off with public? A lot.
Tuesday, amateur video filmed in Washington Heights showed two cops whip out expandable police batons and attack a pair of Black men. At one point, multiple officers are seen hitting one of the men while he’s on the floor. Anonymous police sources, got in the first word (a courtesy they’re often afforded by the press), proclaiming the men responsible for their own beatings. Police, whose misconduct history is shielded from the public, also shared the men’s arrest history with the media.
The NYPD says there is body cam footage but hasn’t released it. Newly released surveillance camera footage appears to show the men. allegedly smoking at a subway entrance, refusing to be arrested and one of them throwing a punch at one of the officers (that didn’t land). They have been described as homeless. Neither of them were armed.
Initial video shows police, at the very least, escalated the situation. After the men apparently refuse to be cuffed, one officer whips out his baton and bangs it on the ground, Gladiator-style. Cops hit one of the men in the head with the metal baton, leading the second man to approach one of the cops, who runs off camera. That second man ends up on the floor and on the receiving end of batons and kicks as plainclothes officers, described as two detectives and an off-duty cop, arrive to join in the beatdown.
At an unrelated press conference, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that an investigation was underway but echoed police union capo Patty Lynch by placing the blame on the men’s seeming refusal to be arrested (something he apparently knew before the investigation was over). While few media outlets published a narrative other than what police themselves quickly offered, one of the men told a local tabloid: “This was on purpose. They’ve been going at me for the past two, three months … Call me bitches, n — as and everything,” he said.
New video shows one of the men throwing a punch after police tried to grab him. Some may say that excuses the officers actions but they‘re wrong. One man throwing a punch and the police using unnecessary, excessive and potentially fatal force can both be true at the same time. The difference is in who we expect to show better behavior.
Shouldn’t we hold our professional and supposedly trained police force to a higher standard? If the way to deal with men acting aggressively is to beat the shit out of them, then who needs a badge?
Keep in mind that New York City ahas a long, storied tradition of heavy police harassment of the homeless. From the crackdowns that began under Rudy Giuliani’s rollout of Broken Windows policing, which wrought police enforcement against low-level quality-of-life offenses, like begging; to the NYPD’s so-called “move along” rule under de Blasio, cops have systematically targeted those with the least. Is it surprising then, that there’d be animosity towards cops from those living on the street?
There is, however, a new problem arising, and it has less to do with how aggressive police still are and more to do with how we react to these videos.
In the past month there have been other notable incidents involving police. In mid-December a Black mother named Jazmine Headley was forcibly arrested at a food stamp office. Images of the mother having her small child ripped from her arms sparked outrage on social media— but no protests. Two days before Christmas, video of standoff between police and another group of homeless men was widely shared. Footage showing a single transit officer menacing a group of men in a train station with a baton — but not using it — was widely shared.
While the Headley incident was widely condemned, even, eventually, by the Mayor, the standoff in the subway was celebrated as a profile in restraint. Despite the showdown having been described as an “assault” on the cop, none of the men actually hit the cop. What we saw were four obviously drunk men, a few of them sleeping. A few approach the officer after he kicks one of them. One man was so intoxicated that he staggered onto the subway tracks, showing that he was bigger threat to himself than to the officer.
Three of the men were arrested for minor charges, which were dismissed. But after public pressure from (you guessed it) Patty Lynch and the police unions, the homeless men — or “pack of jackals” as the union described them — were re-charged with a slew of serious offenses, including “rioting.” Right wing media even seized on the incident to throw a Trumpian fit because one of the men may have been an undocumented immigrant.
In the end, a group of homeless men who were in the unenviable position of drinking themselves to sleep in a subway station two days before Christmas, who might actually be helped with addiction services and/or housing, were criminally charged and callously described as “hostile vagrants” by the hobgoblin at the New York Post.
Where were the voices to push back and challenge the pro-cop narrative of the Post or the hysterical blowhard, Patty Lynch?
In December of 2014, on the heels of massive protests following the non-indictment of NYPD detective Daniel Pantaleo, who infamously choked the life out of Eric Garner in Staten Island, Mayor de Blasio promised that the city would “aggressively” look to change police-community relations by training cops in “de-escalation” tactics, like waiting for supervisors and backup to arrive during tense situations. Change was coming, he grandstanded, “because the people demanded it.”
TRAINING? (*Jim Mora voice) TRAINING?!?
Training and retraining is a tired old political talking point in response to police brutality, often an empty stand-in for accountability or justice. But let’s go to the video tapes:
In the video of the subway showdown, a bystander tries to get in between the cop and the men. While the cop showed a degree of patience compared to what we’ve unfortunately come to expect from others, the bystander made a better attempt at de-escalation — even though cops are supposedly trained in it. The officer, outnumbered, seemed to know only one solution: violence.
In Washington Heights, cops seemed to be brimming with adrenaline — not resorting to any ‘training’ — when confronting the unarmed men. The Rodney King style beatdown was criminal, in my book. Still, does anyone think anything serious will happen to the cops from this week’s video, or that something like this happen again?
The parade of police brutality videos that helped many of us see the policing epidemic right in front of us a few years ago may have also desensitized us to injustice. When we see excessive police force now, some of us are now asking if the person on the receiving end deserved it. When we see a cop not kill a group of homeless men, we cheer for them not because our police have learned how to de-escalate or because we have answers to homelessness but because our bar for police behavior is so low.
It’s a cold and grim thought to imagine that someone needs to die for people to question police tactics.
Unsurprisingly, the Mayor’s message is no longer one of change. Don’t resist arrest, he says. Eric Garner, some people might remember, also resisted his arrest. Before his last haunting words of “I can’t breathe,” he pointed out the dozens of interactions he’d had with police from the 120th precinct. “This stops today,” he protested.
We’ve forgotten those words. By doing so, we’ve allowed characters like Patty Lynch, who blamed Garner for his own death because he resisted arrest, and Mayor de Blasio, who refuses to fire Garner’s killer, to change the conversation entirely — something that we will all regret.
