After watching videos of two troubling arrests that led to two officers being placed on modified assignment, two really important points need to be made.
One: Neither case is specifically about race.
Two: These “cowboy cops” gotta be run out of Dodge.
Less than a week after Eric Garner was videotaped dying while being arrested for selling loosies on Staten Island, another NYPD cop, Joel Edouard, 36, was filmed in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, violently arresting Jahmiel Cuffee on suspicion of marijuana possession.
Where there’s smoke in Gotham, there’s video.
Like Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who was placed on modified assignment for allegedly using a chokehold on Garner, Edouard has been placed on desk duty for allegedly stomping a handcuffed Cuffee’s face.
“What is wrong with this officer?” one man screams on the Bed-Stuy video. “Look at your officer! You see that?”
Better question is: Didn’t Officer Edouard see all the citizens out there filming him? Didn’t he have to pass a written test to get into the NYPD? As for Officer Pantaleo, that number 99 on his jersey seems much higher than his IQ.
But the cowboy cops seem unfazed by a whole city with cell phones videotaping their abuses of power.
“Watching the Garner video, I was disturbed not just by what might prove to be a banned chokehold,” one high-ranking cop told me last week, “but that Pantaleo grabbed him from behind and dragged him backwards. Right in front of a plate glass window! That he bangs into. Both of them could have crashed through that window and both could have gotten killed. Where is the mindset in that?”
Dim cops are bad enough.
But there have been some equally dangerous suggestions that the Pantaleo-Garner incident was about a white cop pouncing on a black petty criminal.
When I covered the trial of the officers involved in the 2006 fatal shooting of Sean Bell, it became clear that race had nothing to do with the killing of this black man in a hail of police bullets. All three of the cops charged in his death were men of color. Turns out they were poorly trained and supervised. They panicked, and they just messed up.
They were cowboy cops.
But not murderers. And all were found not guilty.
“It’s not a white-on-black crime,” civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton told me during that trial. “It’s a blue-on-black crime.”
In the Garner footage, all the other white cops and paramedics appear nonchalant over the dying man. Even the NYPD supervising sergeant at the scene.
She is African-American.
Hard to imagine an African-American sergeant leading a gang of racist white cops to kill a suspected black loosies dealer.
And in the Edouard-Cuffee video, both the accused abusive cop and the suspect are African-American.
So if you want to make either case about color, you can try Sharpton’s “blue-on-black” theory.
But let’s slow our horses on race. And concentrate on the real issue of cowboy cops loose on our streets.
That’s not to say that the cowboy cops would have tried those abuses of power on the corner of, say, Broad and Wall Sts.
And if you want to make a case that our police act more like the Earp brothers at the OK Corral in black neighborhoods than they do in predominantly white neighborhoods like Todt Hill, Park Slope, Breezy Point, SoHo, Bayside or Riverdale, you can bet the ranch.
But the race card is a joker here. It just misdirects the focus needed on the cowboy cop tactics that must end on all our streets, in every neighborhood of the city.
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton says the first step is retraining our cops in the use of force.
But you only have to go to the videotapes to see that some cowboy cops need more than retraining.
They need to be fired. And if the evidence is as strong as it looks, these cowboy cops need to be indicted and put on trial.
