police privilege makes me sick

the small-print mention in today’s AMNY is a half-column wide and less than two inches high. let’s just call it what it is: invisible. “Cop won’t face criminal charges for road-rage” is its title, and from the way the piece is written you can barely tell if the cop was the shooter or the shootee.

short story: off-duty officer sean sawyer’s car was cut off by jayson tirado’s and a typical bout of machismo road rage ensued. tirado supposedly stuck his arm out the window and pointed his finger in a toddler-gunlike fashion at sawyer, at which point sawyer blew his head off. there are reports that sawyer had been drinking, but no one knows for sure, since he didn’t turn himself in until 19 hours after the killing. the passengers in tirado’s car were so soused that one of them can’t remember the incident at all and the other’s recollection is hazy.

Irene Tirado

NO CIVILIAN WOULD HAVE GOTTEN THIS KIND OF FREE PASS, but because sawyer’s a cop he literally gets away with murder. if you or i did the same thing, even with a fully-licensed pistol, we’d be facing at least ten years upstate for homicide.

sawyer is STILL ON THE NYPD PAYROLL, suspended with full salary. there is a “possibility” that he will be dismissed from the force. i wonder how jayson’s mother (pictured, shortly after the murder) feels about this ongoing paid vacation for the man who killed her son.

when i was growing up in brooklyn, the police were viewed as wild animals that you had to be very, very careful around: no eye contact, no casual conversation, no sudden movements. don’t even put your hand in your pocket. they ruled the streets and they did so in whatever way they chose. yes, the cops did, as far as possible, protect us from crime and criminals, and i am not making light of their indispensible service. but there was no one and nothing that could protect us from THEM: even the institutions put in place to oversee police behavior were staffed and run by the police themselves. the civilian complaint review board, then as now, simply rubber-stamped police misbehavior and doled out the occasional wrist-slap.

MY FATHER WAS A COP FOR 20 YEARS. in 1971, after one of his beatings, i was taken by ambulance to an emergency room. the extent of my injuries inspired the hospital to call for my father’s arrest. but the hospital was in the same neighborhood as his precinct, so he was in effect picked up by his buddies. they had him handcuffed in the ER waiting room, and i could hear him cursing the doctors who had the nerve to try and get him in trouble for “disciplining” his daughter; i could hear the arresting officers agreeing with him and asking him to just be calm, as he was going to no doubt be cut loose very soon. they held him until he started sobering up, then drove him home. no charges against him were ever filed. the case that i subsequently brought to the CCRB was dismissed. my father told them that i was lying, that my boyfriend actually beat me up, not him. no investigation was done, the case was simply closed, though there were several witnesses who would have gladly testified on my behalf: my grandmother, my mother, and my mother’s brother, the person who finally, after a few hours, told my father “that’s enough” and pulled him off of me.

FIVE YEARS LATER, walking through washington square park, i encountered a small crowd surrounding two officers who were kicking and nightsticking a man on the ground. a righteously indignant teenager, i got right in the middle of the circle and began calling for the cops to stop and exhorting my fellow citizens to stand up for what was right and not just let this happen. next thing i knew i was there on the ground along with the first guy, though they didn’t beat me up as badly as they’d been beating him: kicking the shit out of some black old guy who isn’t resisting is different from kicking the shit out of a bigmouth white girl, at least in public. so they waited until they got me to the precinct, where i was cuffed to a chair, my shirt ripped down the middle (no bra, this was still the seventies, after all), smacked, kicked, spit on and cursed by every passing officer for several hours. when they finally let me make my legally-required phone call, i got my father down there with HIS badge. if i didn’t happen to have a cop-daddy, i am not sure where that night would have ended. a body floating in the river? not impossible. there is no doubt in my mind that people are killed in NYPD police precincts, though likely not as often now as in the past.

the NYPD continues to be out of control, though not as outrageously as it was in the past, and continues not to be held accountable for their actions, as the killing of jayson tirado illustrates. for every high-profile case like sean bell, abner louima, patrick dorismond or amadou diallo, there are a hundred jayson tirados and likely thousands of experiences like the one i was subjected to in the village all those many years ago.

has some progress been made? yes. but not enough. not even close.

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