The New York Times, November 19, 1997, page 1.
By Deborah Sontag and Dan Barry
After dropping her young daughter with a baby sitter, Taquana Harris rushed to her hostess job at the fashionable Bowery Bar one night last February, her leopard-print evening gown sweeping elegantly through the dark, icy streets of the East Village. Then a strange woman crudely grabbed her by the arm and demanded to know what she had done with the drugs.
Within seconds, Ms. Harris recalled, she found herself pinned to the steel grating of a bodega by two plainclothes officers engaged in a neighborhood drug sweep. Frustrated by the officers' refusal to hear her explanation for being on that particular block, Ms. Harris made a tactical mistake: she wisecracked. "Oh, I get it," she said. "You're trying to reach a quota."
One officer responded with pepper spray, blasting her in the face. Distraught and weeping, Ms. Harris was taken in handcuffs to the Ninth Precinct station house, where she was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Later that night, months before the charges were dropped and the city paid $50,000 to settle her claim of civil rights violations, one of the arresting officers left her with some parting words: "You don't talk to police officers the way that you did."
The officer's comment, in an otherwise mundane case, drives to the heart of what links Ms. Harris's unsettling encounter to the worst cases of police brutality. However they end, be it with a strip search or a face slammed into the pavement, most misconduct cases begin with what the officers perceive as a challenge to their authority.
Such challenges lie at the root of so many civil rights lawsuits, and of so many academic studies of police behavior, that they are recognized as a phenomenon unto themselves. They provide the catalytic moment when, with the hint of power shifting from an officer to a citizen, routine encounters can escalate into explosive incidents. One officer may feel challenged by taunts, another by the simple question, "What did I do?"
These challenges continually test the relationship between civilians and the police, who are given guns, nightsticks and wide latitude to keep order. In New York City, that tenuous contract is tested even further by the often brash assertiveness of the city's residents. More so than elsewhere, experts say, the New York police are called on to show unnatural restraint in their dealings with the public.
The New York Police Academy tailors standard police training to instruct new officers on how to absorb verbal aggressiveness like a sponge, or, in the martial arts language they use, to "bend like the reed in the wind."
Once planted on the real streets of New York, however, the reeds are not so supple. Many officers see disrespect as a threat, not just to their job performance, but sometimes to their lives. For them, choosing to dominate testy citizens without overasserting themselves is not only an art but an attitude. Some situations, they believe, require forcefulness, and there is a fine line between appropriate and inappropriate force.
Officer Michael F. Wilson, a 13-year veteran of the force who teaches sociology at the Police Academy, said many officers struggle to rise above their visceral reactions to disrespect.
"Initially, when someone gives you major grief, you're stunned," he said. "It's like the first time you got punched as a kid. You're shocked, and your body wants to react. In the best of cases, though, there is this little person inside your head saying, 'It's not worth it. I put my hands on this person, I lose.'"
Spokesmen for the police argue that the thousands of police misconduct claims a year in New York City should be put in statistical context. Every year, the department makes 330,000 arrests and issues 1.5 million summonses for moving violations, and the great majority of those encounters are handled properly.
But critics say the recurrence of garden-variety misconduct cases like that of Ms. Harris's reflects the failure of the Police Department to alter something deeply embedded in the police culture: an us-versus-them mentality that makes many officers distrustful of those they encounter on the street. And they point out that, as the police aggressively enforce Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's "quality of life" strategy, the number of misconduct and excessive force claims has increased significantly, from 3,956 in 1993 to 5,596 last year.
An examination of dozens of police misconduct cases suggests that a variety of challenges to police authority - asking for a badge number, videotaping officers, leading them on a chase - can provoke an incident. Some officers feel irritated when someone files a complaint against them, others when a bystander intervenes in their handling of an encounter.
The officers' responses also vary, from the proper, non-confrontational handling of a matter to a vindictive arrest, from a thwock with a flashlight to a debilitating beating.
One young man, Douglas Snyder, a New York University student, was kicked in the face until he lost consciousness after videotaping a police confrontation with squatters; the camera was smashed and urinated on. Another, Edward Dominguez, a high school student in the Bronx, was a passenger in a speeding car; an officer kicked him so hard in the groin that he lost a testicle.
In such encounters, the person usually ends up charged with one or more of what civil rights lawyers refer to as the triumvirate of charges: resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and the obstruction of governmental administration. Those charges are almost invariably dropped, but not before punishment has been delivered in the form of a humiliating strip search or a night spent in a holding pen.
In addition to traumatizing some law-abiding citizens, experts say, these cases cost the city millions of dollars in lawsuits and immeasurable capital in public trust.
"I used to be the kind of person, when I see an officer, I smile," said Nancy Tong, a documentary filmmaker who was taken into custody for speaking disrespectfully to an officer. "I'm not that kind of person anymore."
New York's most notorious recent cases of police brutality stem from what the officers saw as challenges to their authority.
Prosecutors say that an officer's mistaken belief that Abner Louima was behaving aggressively toward him prompted the beating he gave the Haitian immigrant inside a Brooklyn station house. Francis X. Livoti, the officer dismissed this year for using a choke hold that led to the death of a Bronx man named Anthony Baez, explained that he moved to arrest Mr. Baez and his brother because, he said, they refused to stop playing football when ordered, "daring" him to "take some kind of action."
"Like Livoti, many officers experience rampant disrespect and view it as undermining their authority," said Stuart London, a lawyer who won Mr. Livoti an acquittal on murder charges and represents many officers accused of misconduct.
"Every day," Mr. London said, "throughout the city, you have officers who are routinely turning the other cheek. But sometimes they feel they have to take a stand in order to patrol effectively, and then something minor can really escalate."
Ill-Chosen Words
A Traffic Encounter Escalates in Chinatown
It was a hot August night three years ago when Ms. Tong, the filmmaker, was caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the narrow streets of Chinatown, and, she said in an interview, climbed from her car to peer at, what lay ahead.
From behind her, a voice barked, "Get back in that car!"
Ms. Tong, 43, an immigrant from Hong Kong, shot back: "What's the big deal? It's a free country." When she turned around, she drew in her breath. She had unwittingly talked back to a police officer.
She ducked back into her car and when traffic began to move, the officer ordered her to pull over and demanded her license, which she had left at home. She asked what she had done. The officer got very angry, she said, and told her driving was a privilege, not a right. He then told her the computer showed her license was suspended, which it was not, as he later admitted. Ordering her out of the car, he handcuffed her and took her into custody.
At the Sixth Precinct station house, she was strip-searched in a bathroom by a rubber-gloved matron, who took away her belt and keys. She was locked in a holding cell until the early hours of the next morning, then released with two tickets: one for driving without a license, the other for "failure to comply with an order." Both were later dismissed, and Ms. Tong sued the city.
"Unfortunately for them, I know a little bit about my rights," she said. "This is not China." She won a $35,000 settlement in 1996.
Ms. Tong's case typifies a pattern in which the blunt and often abrasive language of New York City aggravates an encounter with the police. Police experts say that the city's officers and residents expect one another to withstand a little verbal abuse. But some police officers perceive sarcasm and insult as direct challenges to their authority and, experts say, overreact.
"New Yorkers have big mouths," said Paul Chevigny, a law professor at New York University and an expert on police culture. "More of them are on the liberal side, and are more critical of authority, than in other places.
"In a way, I find New Yorkers charmingly naive. They imagine they live in a city where they can challenge authority and not get hurt. They're wrong, and that's too bad."
Officer Wilson, the Police Academy instructor, said he urges young officers not to take things personally. "I tell them people are not mouthing off at you, Mike Wilson, but at the the uniform, the authority," he said.
Video Challenge
To Record May Be to Provoke
A challenge to police authority does not have to be verbaL In several cases examined, people had their tape recorders or video cameras damaged or their tapes taken, suggesting that to record some officers at work is to provoke them.
During the city's celebration of the Fourth of July in 1995, some squatters reclaimed an East Village tenement from which they had been forcibly removed by the police several weeks earlier, then trumpeted their small victory by hurling bricks and firecrackers at the police. The department responded by sending hundreds of officers to the building, including dozens in riot gear.
Across the street, several college students had gathered on a rooftop to admire the fireworks over the East River, but turned to watching the struggle below. At one point, some police officers clambered up to the roof to question them, court records show, but left after being satisfied that the students were not involved in the fracas.
But Douglas Snyder, a New York University photography student, later said that he
began to videotape the confrontation after seeing officers strike pedestrians with nightsticks and shields, just as the lights of a police helicopter above washed over him.
Minutes later, Mr. Snyder testified during a deposition this year, several police officers in riot gear stormed the roof with guns drawn. The officers screamed for everyone to "get down," several witnesses testified, then began kicking the students. Two officers ran over to Mr. Snyder and smashed his recorder, he said. Then one kicked him in the face until he lost consciousness.
Megan Doyle, Mr. Snyder's girlfriend at the time, began to scream. She later testified that officers threw her to the ground and put a gun to her head, calling her "slut" and "whore." Then she, Mr. Snyder and several other students were handcuffed, arrested and held for several hours on charges of disorderly conduct.
The morning after the encounter, Mr. Snyder found his smashed camera on the roof. The tape was missing.
The charges were dropped several weeks later, and a few months ago the city paid $50,000 to Ms. Doyle and $42,500 to Mr. Snyder to settle their lawsuits.
Question Authority?
Power to Arrest Can Be Abused
Dr. James O'Keefe, the director of training at the Police Academy, says the academy works to instill in officers a wary respect for the public, and to convey the lesson that emotion should never overtake reason.
For decades, the academy operated like a boot camp, in which verbal abuse was thought to prepare recruits for the streets. But officials came to suspect that the approach also taught officers to treat citizens in a similarly harsh manner.
After a phase using transactional analysis, an approach based on a form of popular psychotherapy, the academy now uses the martial arts paradigm to convey the importance of bending like a reed. In classes and role-playing situations, officers are taught that verbal attacks don't threaten them, and that their role in a confrontation is to end it, not win it.
But those officers who respond inappropriately to challenges have more at their disposal than flashlights and batons to exact punishment. Officer Wilson spells out to recruits why they always have the upper hand. "At the end of the day," he tells them, "you have the power of arrest."
In most police misconduct cases, civil rights lawyers said, that power seems to be abused. In such cases, officers often level charges to punish someone who has shown them disrespect, or to cover up their mishandling of an encounter, the lawyers said.
In Los Angeles, Merrick Bobb, a special counsel to the city, tracks the use of such charges as resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, noting when they are leveled and dropped, as one way to identify problem officers.
"You find clearly that often those contempt-of-cop arrests are filed by the police officer as a way to cover a use of force that may be questionable," Mr. Bobb said. "You also find that these charges get dropped because they are not valid."
New York City does no such tracking, although the police misconduct files suggest a similar pattern.
The case of Sahar Sand is one example. Manhattan prosecutors recently declined to prosecute Mr. Sand, 22, for resisting arrest after an encounter with the police that landed him in a hospital emergency room earlier this year. His mistake, he said, was responding to a request for his license and registration with a question, "Why?"
A month after emigrating from Israel, Mr. Sand became confused by Manhattan traffic patterns and unknowingly drove the wrong way down East 62d Street before being stopped by the police on York Avenue. When he questioned the order to produce his license, an officer punched him in the arm, he said. He was directed to pull over in a bus stop, he said, only to get a ticket later for illegally parking there.
Mr. Sand then climbed out of his car, he said, and refused to get back in, telling the officers he feared getting struck again. That, he said, pushed the officers to kick his legs out from under him, beat him with their fists, handcuff him and twist his fingers. "Go back to the Middle East," he said he was told.
On the way to the station house, the arresting officer warned Mr. Sand not to bleed all over his cruiser, and then punched him again, he said. Terrified, he began to hyperventilate, and was taken to New York Hospital instead. Hospital records show that he was treated for a bloody nose and abrasions on the cheek and forehead.
Mr. Sand sought the assistance of Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Assemblyman who helped him find a lawyer. A strong supporter of the police, Mr. Hikind scoffed at the idea that Mr. Sand had done anything wrong. "This is one of the most abusive cases I've ever seen." he said. "If this guy resisted arrest, why did they drop the charges?"
Hell on Wheels
Bronx Car Chase Ends In Injury and Arrest
Among the most provocative ways to challenge police authority, as Rodney G. King learned, is to engage officers in a car chase. As Jerome H. Skolnick and James J. Fyfe noted in "Above the Law" (The Free Press, 1993), their study of police conduct, "Fleeing motorists become prime candidates for painful lessons at the end of police nightsticks."
Edward Dominguez, 17, and his brother-In-law, Vicente Fernandez, then 20, did not consider themselves to be fleeing motorists on a spring night in 1993, just speeding drivers traveling a deserted highway at 70 miles an hour. Mr. Fernandez, a Dominican immigrant who works in his father's supermarket, had just picked up Mr. Dominguez, an American-born Dominican, from his job at one of his father's Mexican restaurants in the Bronx.
The men remember making a U-turn on Gun Hill Road, but said they were unaware at the time that a police cruiser began following them after the illegal maneuver. During testimony in a Police Department trial, however, the officers said they were forced to chase the young men at high speed on the Bronx River Parkway until Mr. Fernandez's car broke down.
With guns drawn, two officers pulled the two young men from the car, threw them on the ground and handcuffed them, both sides said. Mr. Fernandez was struck twice in the head with a police revolver, which left him with a bump on his forehead and a cut on the back of his head, according to hospital records.
With both men face down on the ground, Officer Francisco Rodriguez repeatedly asked where they had stolen the car, ignoring Mr. Fernandez's claim that it was his mother's. When Mr. Dominguez asked what they had done wrong, he said, the officer told him to shut up and spread his legs.
Then, Mr. Dominguez said, the officer kicked him hard in the groin, causing excruciating pain. One testicle swelled so much that weeks later it had to be removed.
At the police station house, a nauseated Mr. Dominguez told Sgt. Henry Pelayo that he was in pain from an officer's abuse. The sergeant, Mr. Dominguez' said, told him no one had harmed him. When the young trim insisted, according to prosecutors, the sergeant placed his hand on his gun and said: "No, you fell! Nobody hit you. You fell."
About 3 A.M., the young men were released to Mr. Dominguez's father, who drove them to the hospital. Mr. Dominguez's sister called the Civilian Complaint Review
filed a complaint. By dawn, the incident was under investigation, and the young men were interviewed by the police as they sat in wheel-chairs in the emergency room.
A year and a half later, during the officers' departmental trial, Rae Downes Koshetz, the Deputy Commissioner in Charge of Trials, found the young men's complaints about their injuries at the hands of the officers to be "plausible, promptly made, unexplained 'by the respondents, and corroborated by independent medical evidence."
She found Officer Rodriguez guilty of physical abuse and of calling Mr. Fernandez a "Dominican faggot" Reffering to the "gratuitous nature of the misconduct and the serious
injury inflicted on Dominguez," she recommended that he lose 30 days' pay and be placed on probation for a year.
She found Sergeant Pelayo guilty of bullying and threatening the men, of "misconduct per se" and of condoning the misconduct committed at the scene. She recommended suspension without pay for 20 days, which Commissioner William J. Bratton upgraded to a 30-day suspension.
Both men were subsequently indicted by the Bronx District Attorney's office, and a trial date will be set in two weeks. They remain on the force. Officer Rodriguez's lawyer would not comment; Sergeant Pelayo's lawyer said his client was innocent.
Mr. Dominguez, meanwhile, dropped out of high school in his senior year, had a psychological breakdown and, at 21, is supported by his father. He was briefly married, but the marriage ended because he was unable to father a child due to his injury, he said.
He was born and raised in New York, but is considering moving to the Dominican Republic for a fresh start.