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The Police are Fundamentally Anti-Democratic and a Huge Problem

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On this holy day of LGM’s 15th birthday, let me return to the hobby horse that got me asked to blog here in the first place: the police and why they’re a problem. Today let’s focus on transparency!

There have been a couple of really good stories (“good” in insight, not in the material covered) published in the past week week or so about the problem of police transparency, particularly in regard to the NYPD. The most relevant and pressing reason for this coverage is the fact that Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who was captured on film murdering Eric Garner by choking him to death, is currently on administrative trial by his employing department. As Nick Pinto writes in the Columbia Journalism Review, accurately covering the case has been a nightmare for reporters because the department doesn’t want them covering it, which fits inside a larger pattern of obfuscation and resistance.

As a staffer at the Village Voice and a freelancer for other outlets, I’ve written a lot about the NYPD: about its refusal to adopt training that would probably help its officers stop killing so many people; about its disconcerting tendency to blame cyclists and pedestrians for their own deaths in motor accidents; about its tenacious refusal to comply with public records laws; about police who perjure themselves on the stand; about its treatment of political demonstrators, from infiltrating nonviolent movements with violent undercover agents to roughing up and arresting journalists to using dangerous acoustic weapons on protesters at close range. And of course, I’ve written about some of the many instances in which officers have killed unarmed Black men.

This isn’t the sort of press attention that the NYPD is eager to facilitate. Calls and emails to DCPI about these stories routinely go unanswered. The last time I tried to cover a departmental trial was in 2017. Officer Richard Haste had shot an unarmed 18-year-old named Ramarley Graham in his bathroom after breaking into Graham’s home without a warrant. Informed of my name and publication, a DCPI officer asked me to wait as he escorted in other reporters and an entire school field-trip class, then turned to me and cheerfully apologized that the room was at capacity.

One of the ways the NYPD exerts control over the press is through its monopoly on credentialing journalists. If you want to cover breaking news, or courts, or government hearings in New York City, you’re much more likely to get within earshot of the goings-on if you’ve got DCPI press credentials. Yet persuading the police that you’re worthy of a press pass in the first place can be difficult—Gothamist, an online news outlet, spent eight years trying, and ultimately had to hire a lawyer to get one. The power to revoke a press pass is also a potent coercive tool. As the back of every NYPD press pass reads: “This card is the property of the New York City Police Department. It may be taken away by competent authority at any time.”


For spot news photographers in particular, a press pass is effectively a work permit, and losing it is tantamount to unemployment. When a building collapsed in midtown Manhattan in 2015, killing a construction worker and trapping another, the NYPD herded photographers and other journalists down the block, away from any clear view of the scene. A recent Daily News story had laid the blame for a recent spike in construction deaths at the mayor’s feet and, as emails sent that day would later reveal, City Hall was concerned that this latest disaster would only bolster that narrative. J.B. Nicholas, then a contract photographer for the Daily News, managed to avoid the police corral, and got the coveted shot: the injured worker being loaded onto an ambulance. Police officials, enraged, confiscated Nicholas’s credentials. Nicholas had to sue to get them back, and ultimately won a decision enjoining the NYPD from revoking press credentials without due process. “If the cops control who can report the news, the cops control the news, right?” Nicholas tells me. “You can’t let that happen. That’s called censorship.”


And so on: In 2012, Robert Stolarik was photographing a stop-and-frisk arrest in the Bronx when police confiscated his credentials and violently arrested him. The NYPD eventually returned his credentials and, three years later, the arresting officer was convicted of lying about the incident.


Another way the NYPD avoids scrutiny is by routinely dodging its responsibility under New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL). In 2013, Bill de Blasio, who was then the New York City Public Advocate, surveyed city agencies on their compliance with public records laws, and gave the NYPD an “F,” noting that the department failed to so much as respond to nearly a third of requests. Four years later, de Blasio was mayor, and a Village Voice investigation found that the NYPD kept the most incomplete and erroneous FOIL log of any city agency surveyed.


It took a lawsuit and a court order to force the NYPD to end its years-long—illegal—insistence on only accepting FOIL requests via snail mail. I’ve written about the efforts of a historian to get the department to cough up records on a political movement from half a century ago; she had to file a lawsuit, and only after it got some press were the records fortuitously discovered. There are a zillion stories like this. Everyone who’s asked the NYPD FOIL office for something has similar stories.


Recently, the NYPD began answering some Freedom of Information requests with “Glomar” responses, saying that it could neither confirm nor deny the existence of responsive records. Previously, Glomar responses had been limited to national security agencies, but the NYPD wanted to use them to avoid disclosing whether it was illegally using cell-tower spoofers to disrupt the phones of non-violent protesters. Only another lawsuit and a strongly worded judicial opinion would put an end to Glomar responses; the request for records about spoofers is still pending.
 
THE SECRECY SURROUNDING the Pantaleo trial is owed largely to Section 50-a of the New York State Civil Rights Law, which stipulates that “All personnel records used to evaluate performance toward continued employment or promotion, under the control of any police agency or department…shall be considered confidential and not subject to inspection or review.” Adopted in 1976, it was used to keep defense lawyers from trolling police witnesses’ personnel files for embarrassing write-ups of off-duty misconduct, it has been interpreted over the years in increasingly broad terms. In December, a New York Appeals Courtruled that even anonymized police disciplinary records must be kept hidden from public view.


Police Commissioner O’Neill has expressed frustration with 50-a, saying that he wishes his hands weren’t tied, and that the law should be changed. In the state legislature, a few bills to repeal or reform 50-a are stuck in committee; their supporters say that O’Neill and de Blasio have done nothing to advocate for their passage.


Reporting on this beat, one starts to get a sense that the mechanisms of democracy have gotten stuck in a paralyzing loop. The public can’t know if the NYPD harbors killers because of an anti-transparency law. The political leadership lacks the will to change the law because they’re afraid of the power of the police unions. The unions magnify a sense of grievance among police officers that predates the Black Lives Matter movement but has grown in response.


Entering the courtroom for Pantaleo’s trial each day, Garner’s family must walk through One Police Plaza’s Hall of Heroes, where a large memorial floral arrangement proclaims that Blue Lives Matter. Pat Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, argues that officers like Pantaleo are acting on policies handed down by the city’s leaders and the people who elect them. Blaming beat cops when the ugly realities of policies are revealed is rank hypocrisy, in Lynch’s view. But if some of the responsibility for police action lies with the New Yorkers in whose name they act, shouldn’t the public know what officers are doing?


It’s the job of the press to inform people. It’s hard for us to do that when we’re stonewalled by a culture of police silence, backed by the highest levels of political power. For this story, the NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.

The day before Pinto’s piece dropped, historian Matt Guariglia published an article in the WaPo that adds further historical depth to what Pinto is saying. Guariglia’s focus is on the loss of the New York Police Museum and its attending archives, but the implications are much bigger.

Since the early 20th century, the NYPD has been a diligent destroyer of its own archives. In the age of filing cabinets and finite space within municipal buildings, documents were often destroyed en masse. However, in the case of the New York police, much of its archive was reportedly sold to a paper mill in the early 20th century as a way to cover up the rampant corruption that permeated every level of the department in the years of Tammany Hall’s reign.


After its founding however, the museum became a collector of documents as well as artifacts of particular historical significance to the NYPD. These artifacts were strung together to celebrate the official narrative of police history — but they also provide indicators of a darker and more violent past. Photographs, diaries, letters and a miscellaneous smattering of other documents reveal an imagined perspective of what police thought or hoped they were doing in the city. Historians can dissect these records to critically evaluate the history of police power.

Consider, for example, my search for the records of the NYPD’s first Italian detective, Joseph Petrosino. From 1904 to 1909, Petrosino was in charge of the NYPD’s “Italian Squad,” a special group of Italian-speaking officers whose job it was to contend with a xenophobic panic relating to immigrant crime in New York. Petrosino’s papers were preserved in the attic of his descendants, and were not rediscovered until 2006, when his family uncovered boxes stuffed with documents, artifacts and photographs from his career.


The materials were brought together by the NYPD museum and curated into an exhibit that ran until March 2010. In the past few decades, particularly around the time Joseph Petrosino Square was dedicated in Little Italy in the 1980s, Petrosino’s career was framed as proof that the NYPD was a benevolent institution that sought to better serve the diverse population of New York. Yet, given the amount of xenophobia in the department, particularly against Italians, it is very likely that Petrosino’s papers will paint another picture: one in which the NYPD was so frightened of a people that departmental administrators often called “barbaric” and “medieval,” that they deployed a brand-new model of policing in an attempt to subordinate them.


At a moment when politicians and pundits are trying harder than usual to stoke fears about criminal immigrants, it has become especially important to understand the methods law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels has developed to survey and traumatize immigrant populations. The diaries and letters of Petrosino, himself an immigrant, could help historians get a more nuanced view of state violence, racialization and complicity.

Where are those documents now? Presumably they are with the rest of the museum’s valuable collections, in a storage unit somewhere in Brooklyn. However, it seems that friends of the Petrosino family as recently as 2014 appeared on the PBS show “Antiques Roadshow” to get an appraisal of some of the detective’s belongings, suggesting they might soon be on the auction block. Either way, those documents are now inaccessible to the curious public and historians determined to understand the long history of police power.


Storms are not the only way records of policing and criminal justice in the 20th century are hidden from scholars. Since the 1960s, Freedom of Information Act requests have been intended to increase government transparency and give scholars, journalists and the generally curious access to various public documents at the lowest and highest levels of state. In the case of the NYPD, however, FOIA requests can remain unfilled for months, if not years.

When FOIA requests are received, they are most often rejected for any number of reasons. Suing a police department over the rejection of a FOIA request creates its own barrier that very few scholars have the resources or time to pursue. While some departments can easily fall back onto the excuse of being underfunded or understaffed, it is far more often that police departments just seem disinterested or unwilling to be transparent — perhaps out of fear of undermining official narratives.

My fight for access to the letters and diaries of Joseph Petrosino continues, as does the fight of many other scholars trying to pry sensitive or potentially damaging documents out of governments and police departments around the globe.

We fight because we believe there are real consequences to access. Exposing an unvarnished history of the NYPD would pressure the department to rethink tactics that have failed vulnerable communities in the past. Making police departments more transparent is an essential part of making officers more accountable for how they do their jobs. The ongoing political fight over transparency and accessibility are not just watchwords that will determine the future of policing. They are also the battleground on which we are fighting to understand policing’s past.

I submitted an open records request with the Chicago Police Department back when I was still a graduate student, in, like, 2012 or 2013. (Probably a good time to mention that my book is out now!) I still haven’t heard back. I have colleagues who have worked with the records of the Los Angeles Police Department who have described literally being surrounded by armed police officers while they were doing their research who would intimidate and challenge them on why they were taking photographs of certain things, etc.

One thing that people need to understand is that what police departments as institutions (which is different than saying that this is true of all officers) care about most is themselves and the image of their own legitimacy. They are fundamentally anti-democratic, and their unwillingness to let the public know their business is not only reflective of, but also in service of that fundamental anti-democratic impulse.

Anyway, thanks for tolerating me bagging on the police generally and police unions specifically for the past few years. I was a longtime LGM reader before I was part of the team, so it’s a real honor to be celebrating its birthday from this side of things. I’ve learned a lot about some things and become more convinced that I’m right about other things by talking and arguing with the commentariat.

And to blatantly copy and paste Rob’s note that we’d appreciate donations to help sustain the work (and it is work): you can donate through Paypal, and we have also established a Patreon page (although we haven’t yet developed plans for Patreon-specific content). The LGM store remains open, and you can always help out by buying stuff through our Amazon link. Non-financial contributions include liking our Facebook page, and following us on twitter.

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