Posted on January 25, 2016
On Monday, January 25, 2016, Communities United for Police Reform members testified before the New York City Council hearing on the Criminal Justice Reform Act.
On Thursday exactly a year ago, New York City was practically on fire. The startling decision last December 3 by a grand jury to not indict Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer behind the videotaped death of Eric Garner, blew the lid off a razzled metropolis whose citizens were already familiar with police brutality and discrimination. By then, of course, protests had spread across the country, due to the nearly concurrent decision with Michael Brown's case in Ferguson. In New York, as in Missouri, the anger was palpable—like you could reach out and touch it. And it stayed that way, for a while.
On a bitterly cold night in February, William Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner, joined several hundred uniformed officers for an informal memorial service at the corner of 107th Avenue and Inwood Street, in Jamaica, Queens. It was past midnight, and everyone was waiting for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was due to speak. Twenty-seven years earlier, on February 26, 1988, a twenty-two-year-old officer named Edward Byrne was shot and killed on that corner, on orders from a drug dealer, as he sat in his patrol car guarding the home of a witness.
Responding to a Daily News report that found minorities were overwhelmingly targeted for quality-of-life summonses, the de Blasio administration defended the “broken windows” crimefighting tactic Monday — but said it should be used in a “respectful” way.
A spokesman for the mayor credited broken windows — which calls for aggressively enforcing quality-of-life offenses to prevent more serious ones — with driving down crime to historic lows.
When it came to the mayor’s son and the “broken windows” theory, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton didn’t have much to say today.
The typically gregarious police chief declined to offer any extensive comment on Rev. Al Sharpton’s fiery charges at a round table hosted by Mayor Bill de Blasio this morning. Mr. Sharpton claimed that Dante de Blasio, who is half black, would have been the target of an NYPD chokehold if he weren’t the mayor’s son.
At a series of rallies over the weekend, the Rev. Al Sharpton cast the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island as another chapter in an ongoing battle against police brutality.
But some critics of police commissioner Bill Bratton say Garner's death, which came as he was being arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, should instead prompt a "reexamination" of Bratton's core strategy of Broken Windows policing.