KOP WATCH
(Jan. 1999-Apr. 2000)
COMPILED BY A. KRONSTADT 
KOP WATCH CONTENTS
KOP
WATCH PHOTOS
The trial of four Bronx men accused of
shooting Captain Steven Plavnick of the NYPD, allegedly in revenge for
the aquittal of the cop who strangled Anthony Baez to death, was cut
short on April 11 after prosecutors admitted that the key piece of
evidence was fabricated by a police informer. The prosecution was
preparing to present a set of audio tapes that had been given them by
Julio Caraballo, a man with a 30-year criminal record and several
pending cases. Caraballo himself played the part of one of the
defendants on the tape. The defendants were allowed to plead guilty to
unrelated charges, and since they had been in jail for over three years,
were released on time served. Plavick was shot on October 19, 1996, as
he got out of his unmarked car in front of the precinct house.
On
April 10, 2000, Officer William Morales of the NYPD was convicted of
second-degree assault for having shot a fellow employee in a game of
Russian roulette at a store where he was moonlighting. While Morales was
working his shift as a security guard at a store on East Fordham Road in
the Bronx, he took several bullets out of the chamber of his .38-caliber
service revolver, which he was required by the department to carry while
off duty. He then pointed the gun at the co-worker, and said "Russian
roulette," whereupon the gun went off. Morales was defended by a
lawyer paid for by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, who announced
plans to appeal the conviction.
The Street Encounter Committee
of the Civilian Complaint Review Board found that in 1998 to 1999, the
paperwork that a cop is required to fill out upon frisking or searching
a person was actually filed in somewhat less than a half, and in some
categories only a third of cases reported to the board by the persons
who were stopped.
On April 10, 2000, a federal judge ruled that
the City was liable for damages sought by former NYPD Officer Desmond
Robinson, who, while chasing an armed suspect on the subway, was shot
four times in the back by another, white cop who assumed that he was the
suspect because Robinson is Black. Robinson left the police force on
account of that 1994 incident and is now a car salesman.
On
Saturday, April 1, 2000, Officer Cheryl Gaffney was involved in an
off-duty accident in which she ran into two automobiles while
intoxicated. She was arrested for DWI by an officer from the 104th
Precinct in Queens. The following day, three cops from Officer Gaffney's
Precinct, the 84th in Brooklyn, drove to the 104th Precinct to have a "talk"
with the cop who arrested Gaffney. The cops were suspended from duty for
threatening a fellow officer.
On Monday, March 27, 2000,
officers
from the Gang Investigations Unit, which is the same NYPD unit that was
involved in the shooting of Patrick Dorismond earlier in the month,
pursued a suspected marijuana dealer through a schoolyard crowded with
children in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.In the resulting stampede,
three children were injured, and the kids were treated to the sight of
cops arresting a man, guns drawn, in the middle of the schoolyard. The
incident, like the Dorismond shooting, occurred during a sweep of
alleged marijuana dealers conducted under Operation Condor, the latest
mass crackdown by the Giuliani Administration.
A survey of 40
former investigators with the Internal Affairs Bureau, the division of
the New York City police department that is charged with investigating
police brutality and corruption, showed many officers who had been
assigned to this unit were anxious to leave it because its members were
perceived as rats by other cops, and because they believed that serving
in the NYPD's internal policing system would hurt their chances for
promotion.
The survey was conducted by the Commission to Combat
Police Corruption--a panel created by the Giuliani Administration.
At
12:30 on the morning of March 16, Patrick Dorismond, a security guard
and the father of two became the latest victim in a rash of shootings by
undercover New York City police. Dorismond and a friend had stepped out
of the Wakamba Cocktail Lounge at 37th Street and 8th Avenue, where they
had stopped for a few beers after their shift as security guards. They
were trying to hail a taxicab on 8th Avenue, when a man who later turned
out to be an undercover cop approached Dorismond and asked him where he
could buy marijuana. According to eyewitnesses, Dorismond became
offended at the suggestion that he was mixed up with drug dealers, words
were exchanged, and a scuffle broke out which ended with a shot being
fired by another cop acting as a backup, killing Dorismond. Although it
was apparent that Dorismond was acting on a "just say no"
impulse when he turned on the cop, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made sure to
point out that Dorismond had an arrest record including three
convictions for "disorderly conduct."
Four employees
of an Internet consulting firm filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Federal
District Court on March 9, alleging that as they were stopped in an
automobile in Union Square so that two of them could get on the subway,
a plainclothes officer got out of a vehicle disguised as a yellow
taxicab. As the cop rushed at them with a gun, the driver attempted to
pull away in panic, and another officer smashed his window and dragged
the driver'sarm out through the broken glass. The police then handcuffed
all of the occupants of the car, and two of the male occupants were
beaten. The cops claimed to be acting on a report of a stolen car, and
the driver, Jason Rowley, said hat he had reported the car that he was
driving stolen months ago, but that it had been recovered. The four
occupants of the car, three Black men and an Asian woman who are all
graduates of Ivy League colleges, are charging false arrest and
excessive use of force. All criminal charges against the four have been
dropped.
Three NYPD officers and a sergeant were indicted on
March 10, 2000, for crimes related to their continual presence in an
alleged mafia hangout in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Sgt. Ernest Vitolo and
Officers Kenneth Dunn, Francis Mazella, and Miguel Paniss were arrested
after a five month sting operation implicating them in the fixing of
traffic tickets, in exchange for free meals and stolen power tools,
which took place at the Cafe Caserta on Bath Avenue. Neighborhood
residents said that it was common knowledge that the cafe was a place
where people went to get their tickets fixed. The cops also used the
cafe for "cooping," or sleeping while on duty, and to drink
alcoholic beverages while on the job.
On the evening of March
1, 2000, 23 year old Malcolm Ferguson was shot to death by Officer Louis
Rivera, who chased him up the stairs of a housing project in the Bronx,
a few blocks from where Amadou Diallo had been shot just over a year
earlier. In fact, Ferguson had been arrested the previous week at a
protest in the area over the acquittal of the four cops who had killed
Diallo. Officer Rivera had been part of a plainclothes anti-drug unit
which spotted a group of men in the hallway of a housing project. When
Ferguson bolted up the stairs, Rivera chased him, and at some point
Rivera's gun went off, hitting Ferguson. Ferguson was not armed. Police
reported having found six packs of heroin on Ferguson's dead body.
Officers
James Caputo and Damian Marcaida were arraigned for 1st degree assault
and official misconduct in Bronx Criminal Court on March 1 for having
allegedly responded to a woman's 911 call by taking her to a vacant lot
and beating her until her nose and jaw were broken. The woman had called
for help during a fight with her boyfriend, and became agitated when the
cops arrived in front of her building and refused to get out of their
car; when she demanded their badge numbers, they handcuffed her and
dragged her into the car, later driving her to the lot where she was
assaulted. Officer Caputo is also charged with filing a false report
saying the woman's claim of domestic abuse was unfounded.
One
of the four Bronx cops who fired a total of 41 shots into the body of
Amadou Diallo and was acquitted of murder by an Albany
jury is
being sued by a Bronx resident for having brutalized him in an incident
unrelated to the Diallo killing. Hector Luis Lorenzo Rivera has accused
Officer Kenneth Boss of being one of four Street Crimes Unit cops who
knocked him off his bicycle in December, 1998, and intentionally broke
his ankle. The cops were in plainclothes, as they were in the Diallo
incident, and failed to identify themselves. Although Boss had signed a
complaint against Rivera charging criminal possession of a weapon and a
controlled substance and resisting arrest, these charges were dismissed
by the Bronx District Attorney's Office, which deemed the charges the
product of an illegal search. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was also named as a
defendant in the suit.
At the beginning of January, New York
City Police Commissioner Howard Safir admitted that Capt. Charles Dowd,
former commanding officer of the 88th Precinct in Fort Greene, Brooklyn,
had systematically underreported incidents of crime in that precinct in
1998 in order to keep City officials happy. By misrepresenting felonies,
in particular robberies, as misdemeanors, Dowd was able do portray a
major drop in crime in his precinct, which was later exposed
when
the apparent crime rate jumped enormously. Four other commanders in
various parts of the city are also under investigation for the
manipulation of crime statistics. It remains to be seen if a large "increase"
in crime will come to light shortly after Giuliani leaves office, which
will be interpreted by his supporters as the effect of his absence but
will prove to be the result of the cooking of NYPD books throughout
Rudy's administration.
Norman Siegel of the New York Civil
Liberties Union accused the police department of having sat on over 700
cases of police misconduct that have been "substantiated" or
ruled worthy of disciplinary action by the Civilian Complaint Review
board, and that the police have failed to move on cases dating as far
back as 1996. Although Police Commissioner Howard Safir has claimed a
decrease in the number of civilian complaints against police in 1999 as
opposed to 1998, critics of his leadership and that of Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani attribute any decrease to heightened levels of inaction against
brutal and discourteous offiers which have made people think that it is
useless to file complaints in the first place.
On November 1, a
Brooklyn Grand Jury decided not to indict four police officers
implicated in the fatal shooting of Gidone Busch, a mentally disturbed
man Orthodox Jewish man who resisted police, armed with a small claw
hammer, when the cops responded to a minor noise complaint on Aug. 30 of
this year. The hammer, which had the Hebrew name of God carved into it
and was, as one neighbor described it, “10-inches long; the kind
you would use as a nutcracker.” It came out in the grand jury
proceeding that when a friend of Busch came out of the his apartment to
tell the police that the hammer was a religious object and that they
shouldn’t react too strongly to it, he was wrestled to the ground
and handcuffed. The grand jury, however, decided that the cops had acted
appropriately and Police Commissioner Howard Safir has declared that
they will face no internal charges.
Three police officers were suspended from their jobs on November
1 because they were in attendence while off-duty at a party in the Bronx
where two guests had been shot. Officers Rafael Casiano, Miguel Cordova,
and Vernon Taylor were not directly involved in the shootings
themselves, but invoked the 48-hour rule, a clause in their union
contract that enables cops to refuse to discuss incidents with their
superiors for 48 hours thereafter. The cops were suspended for
associating with “undesirables,” since many of the guests at
the party in question had criminal records.
On October 29, Amir Tawfiyq Abdullah Aziz was acquitted of the
shooting of NYPD Captain Timothy Galvin, while he was leading a team
that broke into an apartment in the Bronx to search for weapons on Feb.
5, 1997. An occupant of the apartment had shot Galvin, who, as Aziz’s
attorney Ronald Kuby
pointed out, “was in plainclothes and in someone else’s
apartment.” Initially, another man had been arrested, but the
police later began seeking Aziz and went around telling people who they
thought could lead them to Aziz that they wanted to see him because his
apartment had been burglarized, implying that the cops themselves
thought that Aziz believed the man whom he shot [Capt. Galvin] was a
burglar.
On October 26, former New York Police Dept. Lieutenant Patricia
Feerick was granted executive clemency by Governor George Pataki after
serving barely a month in jail on convictions for trespassing, official
misconduct, and coercion. In 1990, Feerick was the leader of an illegal
detachment of cops who invaded two East Harlem apartments in search of a
stolen police radio that was believed to be the source of taunting
messages to the cops. These officers woke the residents at gunpoint,
wrecked furnature, and wrote “we want the radio” on the wall
of one of the apartments. Feerick became a cause célèbre
for police organizations, and Staten Island Borough President Guy
Molinari took her case to the Republican Governer. She had been
sentenced to two years in jail for what Manhattan District Attorney
Robert Morgenthau described as a “flagrant abuse of authority.”
On
October 20, 1999, Captain James F. O'Connor of the NY Police Department
was charged with criminally negligent homicide and drunk driving for
having run over and killed Afif Hazim, a construction worker, while
Hazim was working in a closed lane on the Throg's Neck Bridge. According
to police sources, O'Connor, who was off-duty, had been drinking heavily
at a celebration for his own promotion to the NYPD Internal Affairs
Department, a division in the police force charged with investigating
police misconduct. While driving his Department issued unmarked police
car from the party, O'Connor ignored signs instructing to drivers to "Stay
in Lane" because of the repaving project where Hazim was working,
and ran over a large number of orange warning stantions befor striking
and killing Aziz. He was seen staggering out of the cop car by other
cops who arrived on the scene, and then refused to take a breathalyzer
test.
On August 30, 1999, police shot and killed Gidone Busch, an Orthodox
Jewish former medical student with a history of psychological problems
but no criminal record. The police had been summoned by neighbors in
the mostly Orthodox Borough Park section of Brooklyn, first on a
report that someone was smoking marijuana in Busch's basement
apartment, and later on a noise complaint. Busch allegedly approached
one of the officers with a claw hammer about ten inches long that one
of his neighbors described as "a nutcracker" and which Busch
used to dance around the apartment with because it had religious
significance to him
The New York Times of August 23, 1999 reported that, in
1998, prosecutors dismissed 18,000 of the 345,000 arrests made in the
city, even before the charges were reviewed by a judge, because, the
District Attorney's office believed the arrests to be flawed. This
means that during that period, 50 people a day were being arrested,
fingerprinted, and run through the system (at a cost to the taxpayer
of $500 on average) whose charges were not deemed worthy of
prosecution because of lack of evidence.
On August 18, 1999, police shot and killed Larry Cobb after a brief
hand to hand struggle as they tried to arrest him for allegedly
breaking into a car on East 94th Street. Cobb was unarmed, and the
officer who fired the shot, Douglas Grant, was armed with the hollow
point bullets which have been deployed by the NYPD because they are
allegedly less likely to pass through the victim and hit a bystander,
but which routinely tear a four-inch wide hole through the person that
they hit.
On June 28, 1999, retired police officer Vincent Milo
confessed that he had witnessed, in the summer of 1967, the vicious
beating of David Pearl, then a sixteen year old hippie, by two other
officers in Long Beach, Long Island. The cops beat Pearl with fists, a
clip board and a blackjack, costing him the use of one eye. The
statute of limitations for criminal charges against the cops has run
out, but Pearl plans to sue the city of Long Beach.
More than 1,200 protesters were arrested for acts of civil
disobedience outside New York City police headquarters over a two week
period which ended on March 30, after the Bronx District Attorney's
office announced the impending indictment of the four police officers
who pumped 41 bullets into Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo as he stood
unarmed on his stoop of his Bronx home on February 4.
The arrestees included celebrities such as actress Susan Sarandon,
Rev. Jesse Jackson, Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez, and other political
figures including former Mayor David Dinkins. Former Mayor Ed Koch had
been scheduled to block the door to police headquarters and be
arrested, but suffered what was described as a cardiac problem hours
before and did not participate.
A mass demonstration on April
15 drew tens of thousands of protestors.
It was in this charged atmosphere that the trial of four cops
accused in the 1997 police station sodomy-torture of Haitian immigrant
Abner Louima. Marvin Kornberg, attorney for Officer Justin Volpe, who
was accused of ramming a stick through Louima's rectum causing
injuries severe enough to warrant a temporary colostomy, came prepared
with an elaborate "theory" of the case by which Louima had
received these injuries in an act of consensual sex. Kornberg's case
collapsed after the testimony of four cops placed Volpe, Louima, the
stick, and various other artifacts of the crime near the bathroom
where Louima described being brutalized. Volpe confessed, and Officer
Charles Schwarz was convicted of holding Louima on the floor while
Volpe tortured him. Two other cops were acquitted of ancillary charges
of having beaten Louima in the cop car after he was arrested in a
minor fracas outside a nightclub, and of having made an attempt to
cover up the crime.
In the hours following the fatal shooting of West African immigrant
Amadou Diallo by four members of the NYPD Street Crime unit, cops
searched Diallo's apartment, throwing the dead man's clothes on the
floor and removing his curtains from the windows. They also questioned
his roommates as to whether Diallo had any enemies, and did not inform
Diallo's friends that it was a group of police officers who had shot
him. In contrast, none of the police involved in the shooting were
questioned until 48 hours following the incident. Diallo, a devout
Muslim who did not drink or smoke, had no criminal record at the time
of the shooting.
The New York Times of January 19, 1999 released statistics from the
Civilian Complaint Review Board whereby complaints of police
misconduct rose by 4.3% during 1998. The Giuliani administration had
been touting a decline in the number of complaints ever since the
number had reportedly peaked in 1995.
On January 21, 1999, James DiMaria, a former Westchester County
police officer, was sentenced to 29 years to life in prison for
killing an enforcer from the Columbo crime family by luring him to a
desolate area and shooting him in the head.
Residents of 159th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue in
Washington Heights had been scheduled in March to be included in the
NYPD "model block program."After the Amadou Diallo shooting,
however, protests caused the police to withdraw the block from the
program, which involves making people show I.D. to be allowed onto
their own street. In his 1997 campaign Mayor Giuliani used the model
block program which he touted for its achievements in stopping crime
and drug dealing in that mostly Latino community, whenever people
asked him what he had done to help Latino New Yorkers.
On April 19, 1999, officer Yvette Walton, a former member of the
Street Crimes Unit, four of whose members shot Amadou Diallo to death
in front of his Bronx apartment building, testified before a City
Council committee about the activities of that unit and reported on
the random and unjustified searches carried out by that plainclothes
unit in African-American and Latino communities. Although she was
wearing a hood over her head during the hearing, hours later Walton
was fired from the NYPD. Her supervisors denied that the firing was
related to her testimony, pointing to some minor infractions for which
Walton was on the carpet, and also denied that they knew it was Walton
who was testifying under the hood. However, Yvette Walton was only one
of three Black women who had ever been a member of the Street Crimes
Unit.
In another shooting by the NYPD's Street Crimes Unit, Dante Johnson,
an unarmed 16-year old Bronx youth was shot after he fled from cops
from the unit who singled him out of a group for adjusting his waist
band in such a way as to give the cops the impression that he might
have had a gun. Cops chased Johnson in a patrol car and grabbed him by
the jacket, shooting him after he wriggled three. Johnson, who was
injured but not killed, was later found to be unarmed.
A manual published by the Public Agency Training Council and used to
train hundreds of police officers around the country urging them to
stop Jamaica drivers and single out cars bearing the red, yellow, and
green colors of the Ethiopian flag, or 'other Jamaican paraphernalia,
bumper stickers, or slogans.
On February 10, 1999 a car driven by police cadet Robert Dzubak
plowed into a private car driven by William Roche, who is
coincidentally an NYPD detective, on the 179th Street ramp of the
Harlem River Drive in Manhattan. Dzubak failed a breathalyzer test and
was arrested at the scene for DWI. Two other police cadets wee in
Dzubak's car at the time.
Emergency Service Technicians reported that on March 30 they saw a
sergeant and several other cops beat Gilberto Justino in a holding
cell at the Bronx County Courthouse after Justino was arrested for
riding his bicycle on a subway platform. The sergeant allegedly
wrapped handcuffs around his fist like brass knuckles; Justino was
later taken to the hospital suffering from an apparent asthma attack.
On April 20, 1999, Officer Richard Molloy was found guilty of 2nd
degree murder for shooting Irish immigrant Patrick Heslin Phelan to
death while the two were drinking together in Officer Molloy's
girlfriend's apartment in January 1996. Molloy was carrying his
service revolver throughout the night of drinking, and used it to
shoot Phelan after an argument broke out.
After 20 months of delay, Zachary Carter, U.S. Attorney for the
Eastern District, is as of this writing about to come up with a report
describing the feeble procedures in place for disciplining New York
City police officers who violate citizens' rights. Carter began his
investigation shortly after the police station torture of Abner
Louima. The Justice Department however has not attempted to begin any
negotiations with the Giuliani administration to arrive at a
settlement to correct the abuses, a step which must be taken before a
lawsuit is filed to remedy the problem.
Not to be outdone by Mayor Duciani and the NYPD, in NYC's
neighboring Nassau County and the state of New Jersey, the ugly face
of aggressive law enforcement has become highly public. On January 13,
1999 Thomas Pizzuto died while in the custody of the Nassau
Correctional Center in East Meadow, Long Island, while serving a
90-day sentence for driving under the influence of drugs. The case was
ruled a homicide by the Nassau Medical Examiner. Lawyers for Pizzuto's
family said that Pizzuto had been beaten repeatedly since the
beginning of his sentence on January 8. When he asked to receive his
regular dose of methadone, "there was an argument, and the guards
told him that if he didn't calm down, he would receive a beating."
After one such beating Pizzuto was forced to sign a statement saying
that he had fallen in the shower, and was then left unattended for
several days. On January 11, he suffered a seizure and was transferred
to the, hospital, where he died two days later.
Allegations that New Jersey State Police use "racial profiles"
to decide which drivers to stop and search on the New Jersey Turnpike
have led to the downfall of Attorney General Peter Verniero as a
candidate for the New Jersey Supreme court. It has also led to the
dismissal of several drug cases, with the potential for many more,
which involved arrests by state troopers John Hogan and James Kenna,
who admitted to irregularities in the Federally required logging of
the race of drivers involved in traffic stops.
Also in Jersey, during the investigation of the April 8 shooting of
Orange Police Officer Joyce Carnegie, several strange events took
place. The first suspect who was brought in, Terrance Everett,
appeared with facial bruises at his arraignment. He was later released
after convincing authorities that he was elsewhere at the time of the
crime. The next suspect, Earl Faison, died in police custody, which
his relatives maintain was the result of being beaten while in police
custody, but which the police claim happened because of an asthma
attack. Finally, on May 12, Condell Woodson confessed to the crime.
On May 11, a Federal jury awarded $5 million dollars to Debra
Ciraolo, who was "cavity searched" by New York City police
officers after being arrested in a minor domestic dispute. According
to the court decision, the search was in violation of a 1986 Federal
appeals court ruling barring strip searches of people charged with
misdemeanors or other minor offenses. Since over 63,000 people had
been strip searched under the Giuliani administration's policy of
arresting people for low-level "quality of life" offenses,
the City must now contend with a much wider class action suit.
On June 16 a Federal grand jury awarded James Quinn, a former Nassau
County police officer, $380,000 in damages for harassment suffered at
the hands of fellow cops after it was made known that he was gay. The
jury heard testimony that cops had placed pornographic pictures on
Quinn's locker and posted phony arrest records around the station
house in which Quinn was depicted as a child molester. The Nassau
County Police Department will have to pay most of the damages, but
Quinn will also be able to collect money from several individual cops. |
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