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What's the Message, Darcel?
June 3, 2019
Over the past year and a half, Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark has prosecuted a sergeant, a captain and a deputy inspector in unrelated cases in Bronx State Supreme Court. A conviction could have resulted in dismissal and prison time. All three were acquitted.
So, what’s up with DA Clark and the NYPD?
Captains Endowment Association President Roy Richter says Clark’s office was investigating “police policies and procedures involving drunken driving as applied to members of the service,” and that Clark told him she wanted to send a message by setting an example in the captain’s case.
Asked what message Clark intended to send, Clark’s spokeswoman, Patrice O’Shaughnessy, said: “They were all acquitted. There is nothing else for me to say.”
A top city law enforcement official who asked for anonymity said, “There’s a reason cops don’t like the Bronx.” He added that, despite the acquittals, “Politically, she [Clark] loses nothing.”
That’s because many in the NYPD regard the Bronx as an anti-police borough. So much so, that two decades ago, the Police Benevolent Association convinced a panel of judges to relocate the trial of four cops who fatally shot the unarmed Bronx resident Amadou Diallo, claiming the cops could not obtain a fair trial there. The trial was moved to Albany, of all places, where the four officers were acquitted.
Clark is the first woman to head the Bronx DA’s office and the first black woman to head a DA’s office in New York State. Her rise to DA started with The Great Switcheroo of 2015, when Bronx Democratic Party bosses selected her to replace longtime Bronx DA Robert Johnson, who decided to become a judge a week after he won his primary race for DA. Clark, who was a judge, then resigned to run for DA.
In November 2016, a month after the appointment of Jim O’Neill as NYPD commissioner, Clark’s office indicted Deputy Inspector Keith Walton, the former commanding officer of the Bronx’s 49th precinct, on charges of official misconduct for allegedly sexually abusing a female officer he supervised. A jury acquitted him in October 2018.
On Oct. 18, 2016, just a week after O’Neill’s appointment, Sgt. Hugh Barry fatally shot Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old emotionally disturbed woman,in her Bronx apartment. Barry claimed she was about to swing a baseball bat at him. Clark’s office indicted him on murder, manslaughter, and criminally negligent homicide charges. In February 2018, a Bronx judge acquitted him.
Less than a week after Barry’s acquittal, Clark’s office indicted Capt. Naoki Yaguchi on charges of official misconduct and obstructing government administration for deliberately delaying a Breathalyzer test for an off-duty detective following his two-car crash in 2017. Last month, a Bronx judge acquitted him.
Note O’Neill’s evolution as police commissioner. In the Danner shooting in his first week in office, he followed Mayor de Blasio’s lead and bleated that the department had “failed” her.
After Yaguchi’s acquittal, as a reflection of his anger towards Clark, O’Neill in effect promoted him, reassigning him to head the Central Park precinct, a position formerly headed by a deputy inspector.
