Wednesday, May 19, 2010

It seems the name I'll use is fitting: The NYEffingPD:

"They wise off, they fucking push you, I expect them handcuffed, all right?" Mauriello said in a July, 2008 roll call. "Anybody gets stopped and it's a summonsable offense, I want them handcuffed and brought into the precinct."

A sergeant told cops they could void such arrests at the end of their tours. "You'll void it later on in the night so you'll all go home on time."

Yet the 81st precinct is not an isolated case - especially when it comes to downgrading crimes.

The Voice discovered a disturbing episode where the police tried to downplay an attempted rape in Upper Manhattan by classifying it as a misdemeanor.

When the Manhattan District Attorney became involved, police were forced to properly reclassify the case as a violent felony.

Carole Sher, director of the Beth Israel Hospital Rape Crisis/Domestic Violence Intervention Program, told the Voice that downgrading rape complaints is a growing problem across the city.
...
As early as 2005, the presidents of the patrolmen's and sergeants' union announced that commanders were forcing their members to downgrade crimes.
And what about those professional, edited & fact-checked journalists who say they'll keep an eye on things?
But no city paper reported the story.

Department spokesman Paul Browne - known to readers of this column as Mr. Truth - dismissed the reports, convincing reporters that the allegations were part of a feud between Kelly and the PBA, which had recently given him a vote of no confidence.

When Mark Pomerantz, the chairman of the Mayor's Commission to Combat Police Corruption, attempted to obtain records from precincts where crime was reportedly low-balled, Kelly refused to turn them over.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg backed Kelly by saying and doing nothing, forcing Pomerantz to resign. With that, the last hope of department accountability ended.
...
Remember the Mollen Commission hearings on police corruption? Chief Daniel Sullivan of Internal Affairs testified he was literally afraid to give then Commissioner Ben Ward bad news about corruption because Ward became furious. Instead, Sullivan hid the most serious corruption cases in what was known as a "tickler" file.

If the top brass feared Ward, how fearful do you think they are of Kelly?

Would anyone on Kelly's internal task force be brave enough to suggest that downgrading crimes may not be an isolated problem but a systemic one?

...
Among the things that come to mind, reading this crap, is
A: NYEffingPD needs to be cleaned out. Badly.
B: An awful lot of journalists in NYEffin'C have earned my title of "Reporters- sorry excuse for".
C: Bloomberg will spend lots of money and effort to crap all over honest gun owners, but he'll not even back his own commission members in trying to ferret out problems in NYEffingPD.

And it gets even worse:
Schoolcraft has already paid a price for speaking out. As in the old Soviet Union, police forcibly took him to Jamaica Hospital last October, where, he says, he was kept against his will inside the psychiatric ward for six days.

He landed there last Halloween night after the NYPD came to his home in Queens and ordered him back to work after he says he fell ill and left his tour of duty an hour early.

When he refused to return, officers called Emergency Medical Service, which determined he had high blood pressure, then transported him to Jamaica Hospital, where he ended up in the psych ward - hardly the usual place for treating blood pressure problems.

His father Larry says the hospital has refused to release the records of his son's stay, including the name of the admitting doctor
.
Now the hospital is playing "Well, we didn't have the proper release to let him see his hospital records", etc. Probably because they're scared to death of him suing their ass off, which he should.

Here's the next problem: when the NYEffingPD will play Soviet games with people for daring to let the facts out, and the hospital will apparently play along, WHY SHOULD ANYONE TRUST THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT? If they'll do that to a police officer, who won't they do it to?

And if Bloomberg actually gives a damn about individual rights and honest cops, why the hell hasn't he done something about this?

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