Eric Garner, Soaked Officers and the Tilted Scales of Justice

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/nyregion/police-water-bucket-garner.html

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In what has emerged as one of the least predictable trends of the summer, police officers in New York City have been getting doused with buckets of water while on the beat. This has happened on three occasions over the span of just a few days, each case captured on video — expressions either of impish seasonal boredom or deeper, more meaningful antagonisms.

The scenes read almost as slapstick: In the videos, the police are shown going about their business, in one instance making an arrest, and then suddenly someone approaches and the drenching begins.

Perhaps because we are supposed to have entered a new era of more compassionate and connected policing, or perhaps because it has been hot and the water might not have been entirely unwelcome, the officers involved responded calmly to these incursions. There were no signs of retaliation or anger. In one shot, two cops just keep walking as they get increasingly soaked.

In a certain version of these events, senior law enforcers might have praised this equanimity, given how hard the Police Department has worked to rebuild trust in the communities it alienated during the long period when officers stopped and frisked young black and Latino men as if it were an addiction.

Last year, a high ranking member of the department explained that relationships were evolving along a new intimate model, with people in various neighborhoods essentially assigned their own police officers whose cellphone numbers and email addresses they could acquire and use.

“Have you ever had a personal issue, like if you had an ailment you had to go see a doctor? You always go see the same doctor,” Rodney Harrison, chief of patrol said. “Well, it’s kind of the same thing now.”

But the notion that you might move on after getting water poured over your head was not met warmly. Speaking to a group of officers at an awards ceremony on Tuesday, Terence Monahan, who is the top uniformed official in the police department, addressed the subject. “Any cop who thinks that that’s all right, that they can walk away from something like that,” he said, “maybe should reconsider whether or not this is the profession for them.’’ The audience applauded.

The bucket incidents are surprisingly complicated. On the one hand they represent untenable displays of disrespect; at the same time no one victimized by them was seriously harmed. At the core, they reveal the considerable tensions in a criminal justice system transitioning from a history in which police and prosecutorial authority too often went unquestioned to a future in which reform has brought new demands for forgiveness and bonding.

By Wednesday three men had been arrested in conjunction with the incidents. One of them, Courtney Thompson, was charged with obstructing government administration, disorderly conduct and harassment. African-American business and political leaders as well as former mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Vice President Mike Pence have condemned the dousings.

But while few would argue that throwing water at a police officer is something that should pass without consequence, the reality is that Mr. Thompson is currently facing more severe punishment than Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer whose chokehold resulted in the death of Eric Garner five years ago.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department decided not to bring federal civil rights charges against Mr. Pantaleo in the case, sparking a fresh round of protests and reflection. Why was he still on the force? Why hadn’t Mayor Bill de Blasio fired him? The city maintains that it is not up to the mayor, that its charter authorizes only the police commissioner to fire an officer — a position that ignores hundreds of years of management history in which bosses push subordinates to get rid of people all the time.

The Police Department in turn is waiting for a recommendation of what to do, not from an independent investigator but from its deputy commissioner of trials, who adjudicates these kinds of disciplinary cases.

One aspect of the case that has caused so much rage relates to the shield of privacy that Mr. Pantaleo has been afforded, thanks to a longstanding law in the state’s civil rights statute — known as 50a — that allows personnel and disciplinary records of police officers to be protected from public view. The law, drafted during the high-crime years of the 1970s, was predicated in part on the idea that officer safety would be compromised — by far worse than buckets of water — if the misdeeds of law enforcement were disseminated.

About Mr. Pantaleo’s past we know that a city watchdog agency had recommended sanctioning him four times, before Garner’s death, only because of documents leaked to the website ThinkProgress two years ago, not because the city believed it was in the civic interest to make these facts known.

While officials make broad claims about the need for more police transparency and the need to revise or repeal Statute 50a specifically, they seem to keep honoring it. When the leak about Mr. Pantaleo surfaced, the city, instead of simply doing nothing, which would have given substance to its rhetoric, began an investigation to go after the leaker.

And yet the same system that works so hard to conceal the pasts of its officers is quick to reveal the sins of defendants. It took virtually no time for the police to let the world know that Courtney Thompson was a gang member affiliated with a Crips subsidiary and that he had been arrested many times.

Despite the recent progressive turn of the New York State Legislature and the passage of bills, including a reform of the bail system, 50a was not repealed in the last session. It did not even come up for a vote. Around the country, similar laws have been softened or effectively dismantled.

In a recent law review article, Cynthia Conti-Cook, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society and an expert in police and privacy matters, pointed out that when an advocacy group in Chicago successfully petitioned local government for years of police records, the public database resulting from those findings did not produce the feared outcome: assaults on officers whose misbehavior was no longer hidden. She argued essentially that more transparency could only enhance the reputations of the many, many officers serving New York City who do absolutely nothing wrong.

Jamaal Bailey, a state senator from the Bronx, is the person in the Legislature most committed to repealing 50a. We talked about the bucket incidents and the grim ironies when they are held up against what has happened in the aftermath of Eric Garner’s death.

“You’re looking at a loss of life and a bucket of water, and each of them should be looked at with the weight of the law,” Mr. Bailey said. “But let’s not act like choking a man is not a big deal.”