A recent article in the New York Times shines a light once again on the dark culture and practices of the New York Police Department. Planting guns and drugs on innocent people, lying under oath, falsifying reports, making up imaginary “eye witnesses” and even murder through neglect or excessive force have been par for the course for the NYPD.
When occasionally these police are found by a court of law to have committed these crimes, the city pays millions of dollars to compensate the victims.
Just this past Sunday New York City comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, agreed to pay $17 million to settle three claims of “wrongful criminal convictions.” The settlements announced will see the city paying $7.15 million to Robert Hill, who spent about 27 years in prison as an innocent man; $6 million to Alvena Jennette, who spent about 20 years in prison; and $3.85 million to the estate of Darryl Austin, who died in prison in 2000 after 13 years of wrongful incarceration.
The settlements are the third, fourth and fifth deals in major civil rights cases reached by Stringer since he took office a year ago.
The two earlier deals were a $6.4 million settlement last February with David Ranta, who was imprisoned for 23 years after being wrongfully convicted of murder, and a $2.25 million agreement in October with the family of Jerome Murdough, a homeless veteran who died at Rikers Island in an overheated jail cell. Jerome was arrested and ultimately murdered by police forces for the “crime” of sleeping in a public housing staircase.
Stringer said in December that he also hoped to settle a $75 million claim filed by the family of Eric Garner, an unarmed man who died last summer after an officer used a chokehold during a confrontation with the police on Staten Island.
What connects the three most recent pay outs by the City for wrongful convictions is retired homicide detective Louis Scarcella who the NY Times described as “a flashy officer who handled some of Brooklyn’s most notorious crimes during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.” The NYPD’s Conviction Integrity Unit has said after pressure from the NY Times that they will reopen every murder case that resulted in a guilty verdict after being investigated by Detective Louis Scarcella.
According to the New York Times the newspaper “examined a dozen cases involving Mr. Scarcella and found disturbing patterns, including the detective’s reliance on the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions and his delivery of confessions from suspects who later said they had told him nothing.”
City officials like Stringer have tried to distance the stories of retired detectives like Louis Scarcella from the NYPD officers operating today saying things like, “The 1980s were a difficult time in our city’s history… and in a certain way, we are sort of unearthing the tangled history of that time period in our court system today.”
This attempt to suggest that officers no longer manufacture false evidence leading to incarceration is clearly a maneuver to purposely hide the truth from the public. Stringer knows very well the story of NYPD undercover officer Steve Anderson, for instance, who testified for two days in 2011 on the common practice of “attaching bodies” to drugs, a term he used to describe the practice of planting drugs on individuals in order to keep statistics-driven sergeants from questioning officer “productivity.”
In that case, The New York Times once again reported that detective Anderson had become “numb” to the process after four years of being on a narcotics team based in Brooklyn and Queens.
“It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators (who are the top officer in a police division) … Seeing it so much, it’s almost like you have no emotion with it,” Anderson testified.
Apologists for the NYPD know very well about the reports that came out just this week detailing how the Brooklyn DA’s office is looking into at least half a dozen cases going back to 2007 at the 67th Precinct, where cops are accused of planting and fabricating evidence to secure convictions of innocent men.
One of the men who was almost legally lynched by these group of officers, 53-year-old Jeffery Herring, was just acquitted this past Thursday of weapons possession charges when a confidential police informant was never produced, despite a judge’s order that the witness appear in court.
In researching the case, a lawyer for Herring found other cases involving the same group of police officers with suspiciously similar stories. In the other cases, defendants also said the guns were planted, with the police saying that “officers saw the suspects storing the guns in plastic bags or handkerchiefs.”
According to the NY Times: “After the arrests, more similarities arose: The use of confidential informers was suddenly mentioned months into the proceedings, and the informers were never produced in court even after judges’ and lawyers’ requests. Judges had called some of the police version of events ‘incredible,’ and the accounts ‘extremely evasive.’”
According to most reports, over the past five years the city has spent close to half a billion dollars ($428 million) in payouts to victims of police brutality or misconduct. In most capitalist publications these millions of dollars are portrayed as a waste of tax payer money while in reality the money is a pittance compared to the compensation our unjustly treated people rightfully deserve. The real waste here needs to be counted in the billions of minutes of precious human life needlessly spent inside the
inhumane prisons of the United States.
