One Police Plaza

I'm No Enemy of the People

August 20, 2018

Let me add my small voice to the louder media clamor to dispute President Trump’s claim that newspapers are the enemy of the people.

I began NYPD Confidential online in 2005 when Newsday bailed out of New York City. Like the best of newspapers, the column seeks to give voice to those who have none; to expose lying politicians and self-righteous public officials; and, when appropriate, to call out the political correctness in the mainstream media.

The week I left Newsday, former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly — who many New Yorkers viewed as the lone man standing between the city and another terrorist attack — banned me from Police Plaza as a “security threat.” He objected to my criticisms of some of his anti-terror policies, specifically his spying on Muslim New Yorkers.

Only the intercession of the NY Civil Liberties Union allowed my return.

In recent weeks, this column has chronicled the feds’ flawed investigation of the 2014 police “chokehold” death of Eric Garner; questioned PBA president Pat Lynch’s refusal to criticize Gov. Andrew Cuomo for legitimizing the release of cop-killers by making their prison record more important than their crimes; and marveled at the metamorphosis of Rudy Giuliani into a shill for Trump, confirming the words of columnist Jimmy Breslin that our former mayor is but “a small man in search of a balcony.”

Or, as the Times's Jim Dwyer wondered aloud when Giuliani was Mayor, would his final destination be the White House or an insane asylum. Looks like it's a combination of the two.

This week, we turn to Sergeants Benevolent Association President Ed Mullins’s letter to his sergeants in which he referred to “The Ferguson Effect in the NYPD.” 

Specifically, he referred to the mayor’s and police commissioner’s signature policy of neighborhood policing, which was created to bring the cops and non-white communities closer, as a “sham.”

Rather, he wrote, the results have emboldened “society’s miscreants … to verbally abuse and incite uniformed police officers, and believe it is okay to taunt them.”

While top department officials call him Crazy Eddie, many in the NYPD feel he is speaking the truth. Said Lynch: “Sadly, this is the result of years of elected officials demonizing police officers and decriminalizing aberrant behavior … with their constant false narrative about police brutality.”

So what’s Lynch’s false narrative and what’s the Ferguson effect? Both stem from the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, by officer Darren Wilson, who is white. Together with Garner’s “chokehold” death, these deaths of black men by white police officers have led to the narrative by politicians, activist citizens and the media that police across the country are killing innocent black men willy-nilly.

The apparent racially discriminatory policies in Ferguson notwithstanding, the fact remains that, after Wilson stopped him, Brown grabbed Wilson’s gun. That’s why Wilson shot him. And there is a medical interpretation that Garner may not have died from a chokehold after all.

You’ll rarely find those facts in mainstream media accounts. Why is that?