Thugs in Blue
THE BEAT GOES ON … AND ON
Once Again, Police Pummel a Plan for Reform
Last Wednesday, an enormous mob surged out of control, menaced citizens, pushed through police lines onto city hall steps, and blocked traffic on Broadway and the Brooklyn Bridge. But uniformed cops stood by, smiling—for the marauders were fellow cops, thousands of them. Yelling profanities and racist slurs, they rocked and dented cars; some kicked a New York Times reporter in the stomach, others chanted “asshole, asshole” at a bewildered photographer and at stalled drivers who talked with journalists. One such driver, Virginia Santana, was near tears at the blockade; she was trying to get her kid to the hospital for chemotherapy. Vicky Cohen, standing beside her car, was enraged. “All they care about is themselves,” she said. Two cops, looking like frat pranksters, shimmied up the bridge exit sign to suspend a banner declaring: “Support US in Blue not the ACLU.”
Over on Murray Street, Rudy Giuliani addressed another police crowd. “The New York Police Department is the very finest in the United States,” he declared, then went after David Dinkins for being anti-police. He criticized the idea of creating an all-civilian complaint review board. “In the words of my good friend, Guy Molinari, BULLSHIT.” The crowd roared.
Next was introduced Molinari’s daughter Susan, a congresswoman from Staten Island, a big police booster, and a single woman. “Homo,” yelled one cop.
Over at city hall, chief David Scott had tried to urge the cops to clear out, since they had no permit to be there. He was met by a sea of flying middle fingers. “Retire! Retire!” chanted the crowd, many of whom were openly drinking alcohol.
This week, New York City launched yet another effort to bridge the precipitous gap between police and public with a proposal for a new, fully independent Civilian Complaint Review Board. Police replied with a Bronx cheer, turning out for one of their largest protests in years. Doubtless tons of time, money, and ink will be devoted to the slugfest, and it’ll be tough to beat the powerful Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which has already launched a radio blitz targeting the mayor.
The argument for an all-civilian CCRB is politically sexy; it sounds like a good antidote to reams of stories of police abuse. But a closer look suggests the proposal on the table is well-meaning but inadequate—for instance, it still leaves the police commissioner with the power to decide what, if any, discipline out-of-control cops should get.
Indeed, some reformers doubt that this is even the right battle to wage. Brutality experts warn that the most efficient and fair ex-post-facto investigations of errant cops won’t remedy a more deep-seated problem. To do that requires a fundamental recalibrating of the police department: how it chooses officers, trains them, and what it tells them about their responsibility to the public.
Best solution or not, the CCRB proposal got new life after policeman Michael O’Keefe killed Jose Garcia in Washington Heights last July. Although a grand jury cleared O’Keefe and concluded he acted in self-defense, Garcia’s death galvanized the Latino community, which often finds itself on the business end of a nightstick. But it’s not just minorities who feel the police operate with impunity—as Jeffrey Wassen and Jeffrey Bergida found out.
CHELSEA: THE JEWS
It was 1:50 a.m. on December 20, 1989, when Jeffrey Wassen’s car hit a taxi near 23rd Street and 8th Avenue; he and his passenger, Jeffrey Bergida, suffered head injuries. Police officers Steven Cruz and Timothy Vandenberg arrived on the scene and asked Wassen if he’d been drinking. Wassen replied that he wanted the advice of Bergida, his friend and lawyer.
That’s when the officers got nasty, according to a sworn deposition from Dean Burney, the emergency medical technician on the scene. Besides arresting Bergida for interference, they disparaged “Jew lawyers” (Bergida wore a chai) and repeatedly declared, “Maybe Hitler was right after all.” They also taunted: “I don’t think much of Jewish men, but I like Jewish women, they take it up the ass real good,” and “This is what happens when Jews have too much money and they don’t know what to do with it.” They called the two men “fag” and “Jew fag.” Later, when Bergida’s head had been bandaged, officers joked that with the red hospital markings, Bergida looked like a character from the TV series Alien Nation.
That episode was kids’ stuff compared with the pain of a fellow in Washington Square Park who was bitten in the testicles by a police dog. Or when cops doused an accused fare beater, Fernando Huerta, with ammonia—then held a lit match close to his head.
JUST ANOTHER STATISTIC
No one would dispute that policing is a stressful, dangerous profession or that good cops deserve esteem. But with the power, the gun, and the nightstick goes a heavy responsibility which is too often shunted, and when it comes to malevolent, disturbed, or violent cops. New York City has a case of terminal denial. Virtually no politician or powerful figure will publicly acknowledge what many privately maintain: that police brutality and abuse in New York City are much more than a blip on an otherwise placid screen.
“The police are given incredible leeway to do whatever they want when faced with a street encounter,” says Legal Aid attorney Scott Ciment. “There is absolutely no government oversight to rein in police abuse.” For Ciment and his colleagues, brutality is common as potholes.
Nobody actually knows how many people are threatened, insulted, intimidated, or groundlessly whacked by cops every day. That’s because the system designed to track brutality is hobbled by fear, disillusionment, and the self-interest of the data collectors. Oddly, in a field in which statistics are churned out like buttermilk, the NYPD won’t release figures for the number of officers disciplined for brutality, the number dismissed, or even which precinct has the most repeat offenders.
All we have to go on are the figures recorded by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is staffed entirely by Police Department employees: From January to June of this year, 1854 complaints were filed, surpassing the number filed during that time last year, 1557. Since 1987, the numbers have generally declined, which the New York Civil Liberties Union says does not necessarily mean there’s less police abuse; just that fewer people are filing complaints.
James Fyfe, a noted criminologist and former NYC cop, says no matter how thoroughly most citizens’ complaints are investigated, the majority are fated to be found unsubstantiated. The reason: They come down to swearing contests between cops and citizens. Of all complaints received in New York, only 3 percent are substantiated, far lower than other cities.
As Koch did before him, Dinkins downplays the possibility of a systemic problem; Lee Brown, by many standards a progressive cop, did too. However, with more officers than any other city, New York is unique: Even if 90 percent of the local cops did not engage in misconduct, that would still leave a staggering 3000 abusive cops. That group alone would constitute one of the largest police forces in America. And specialists say 10 percent is a conservative guess.
Polls may be a more accurate measure of the scope of the problem: In 1991, Gallup found that 43 percent of New Yorkers think the police department uses too much force, a big jump from the 29 percent who said so in 1989. Even the tepid CCRB, in a 1990 report, worried: “If the willingness to resort to unwarranted violence demonstrated at Tompkins Square … is a reflection of the altitudes of the members of the police service, there is reason for concern about what is occurring when police supervisors, journalists, and other citizens are not present.”
Public attitudes sometimes exacerbate the problem. “A lot of people in this city believe cops should be able to kick a little ass,” says Dan Johnston, an attorney and ex-CCRB member. “I believe it’s very harmful to the city and to public safety for the police to treat people in a way [that] they lose respect for the law. But many believe the way to police is by fear.”
QUEENS: THE POLE
“Why they attacked these kids I don’t know,” says Joseph Karpinski, whose son spent his 18th birthday being beaten by city police. Karpinski makes an interesting aggrieved party, since he’s a retired NYC cop.
On the night of February 22, 1989, Abigail Mullins happened to glance out her window as she waited for her daughter to come home. Just then, she saw a small group of teens standing in front of her house. One reached to light a cigarette for another, and missed. Both friends fell. Their companions were reaching to pull them out of this Keystone Kops predicament when a sedan squealed around the corner, nearly hitting the youths. Then, says Mullins, the car’s two occupants attacked the youths. Immediately, a different car arrived from the opposite direction, and its occupants, too, ran over and began beating the group. Mullins didn’t realize the attackers were police—in fact she thought she was witnessing a mugging—and called 911.
One of the four, a young woman, screamed, and an officer grabbed her, another grabbed her boyfriend, a third grabbed Chris Karpinski, and a fourth knocked down Steve Devaney. The young woman says she and her boyfriend spotted a shield around one man’s neck, and, realizing they were police, stopped struggling. The officers warned them away—”get outta here”—and concentrated on Karpinski and Devaney. Another witness says that after the plainclothes officers had pummeled Karpinski, they threw him on a car, and he rolled over unconscious. While his body lay on the ground, the witness says, a uniformed cop arrived and started kicking him. They also smacked the youths with their flashlights and radios. Chris lost one tooth; two to three others were cracked, and his face was seriously lacerated above his eye. He now suffers from severe jaw problems. (His father took snapshots; the official photos, according to the family, disappeared.)
The incident set off a domino chain of litigation; ultimately, criminal charges against Karpinski were thrown out and civil suits on both sides dropped. As for the CCRB, it decided there was no evidence to warrant disciplining the officers. Yet, since a judge decided Karpinski hadn’t prompted the attack by assaulting cops, as police alleged, who was responsible for his injuries seen in the photographs?
In suing the cops, the Karpinskis were hardly alone. A report by Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman shows that in 1991, 659 people filed civil actions against the cops for misconduct, a 25 percent increase from four years earlier. During that time, the city paid out $44 million to victims of police brutality.
Faced now with mounting demand that something be done, the city council last Thursday began discussing a bill to grant independence to the NYPD-controlled Civilian Complaint Review Board, in hopes it will more aggressively investigate police abuses. An angry Mayor Dinkins, still reeling from the cop “Mutiny” the day before, reasserted his strong support for Intro 549, sponsored by Ronnie Eldridge, Virginia Fields, and Victor Robles, along with 15 cosponsors, and endorsed by 17 community boards.
Although revamping the CCRB to give it real power would be a step toward restoring some public confidence, it won’t even begin to address the underlying issues. Councilmember Sal Albanese of Brooklyn who, perhaps more than any other council member, knows police issues, calls it “a red herring. It doesn’t address the real issues.” The department, he feels, must require that cops be city residents, do better training, and upgrade detection systems to get rid of bad cops early on.
“The screening mechanism is not good enough, there are some white cops who never came into contact with the minority community before enlisting,” Albanese says.
THE BOYS DOWN AT THE PBA
Nobody is more attentive to the police brutality debate—and no one takes it more personally—than the PBA, which stands ready to battle any reform.
“I want to welcome you to Fort Scapegoat,” PBA president Phil Caruso told a crowd of cops demonstrating in Brooklyn against “unfair treatment of police officers.” Caruso is the Mary Matalin of police reps—always on the offensive for his members. Caruso groused: “There’s a pattern emerging in this city where the police officers are getting scapegoated and the criminals are getting royal treatment.”
Not so, says Dan Johnston, the ex-CCRBer. Reviewing complaints was like listening to a broken record: Time and again, police had overreacted when a citizen challenged their authority. Johnston recalls: “They would allow things to escalate instead of trying to keep the peace.”
That habitual overreaction may be in part because officers are so disconnected from the city and people they guard. After the Tompkins Square melee in 1988 in which police pummeled scores, Police Commissioner Ben Ward complained that many of the demonstrators at Tompkins Square were from outside the city—but so were the police. In fact, 40 percent of NYC cops live outside the city, and many others live in “cop neighborhoods” in Staten Island and other outer boroughs, often withdrawing into all-cop social lives that only emphasize the “us-versus-them” mentality.
PBA spokesman Joseph Mancini disagrees: “Most cops still live in the city. Even those who live outside the city were born here. Once they started earning decent incomes and raising families, they decided they wanted to be in a suburban setting. It doesn’t make them less committed to the city.”
But it’s indisputable that city cops suffer culture shock when they go from their homogenous communities into unfamiliar territory. Fyfe, the former NYPD officer, grew up in “lily white” Bay Ridge, then found himself plopped into downtown Brooklyn, with its heavy concentration of blacks and Latinos. Fyfe might as well have been in Kathmandu. He learned how to deal with these cultures, but too late: “For a Hispanic man, looking an authority figure in the eye is a sign of disrespect,” he says. “For an Anglo, it’s the opposite. So I’d get angry at a Puerto Rican guy who didn’t look me in the eye, and start yelling at him.” And, too often, from small misunderstandings come larger consequences.
For cops, racial and ethnic strife begin at home—right inside the precinct house. The heads of the black and Latino officers’ associations say that intolerance permeates the department. “If you expect police to be equitable with people on the street, you won’t get it until they treat their own ranks properly,” says Detective Walter Alicea, head of the Hispanic Officers Association of the NYPD.
Detective Robert Rivers Jr., president of the Guardians Association, the black officers’ group, has had his own brushes with the issue, outside of work. Once when off duty, he tried to speak with a uniformed officer. “I called out and he immediately reached for his gun. What did he see? A bald-headed black man.”
Margaret Fung of the Asian American Legal Defense Fund says her group has seen a large increase in abusive cops. Language is a key difficulty—many Asian immigrants can’t understand police orders and few officers speak their languages. And though Asians make up 7 percent of the city’s population, they make up less than 1 percent of the police force.
Cyril Nishimoto of Japanese American Social Services was pleased when the Midtown South precinct invited him to come in and offer some “Sensitivity Training.” But Nishimoto says he came away feeling angry because officers ignored his presentation, actually turning their backs on him as he spoke.
MIDTOWN: THE ITALIAN
According to the CCRB, the most common complaints—40 percent of those registered—concern excessive force, with “discourtesy” second at 30 percent. The remaining complaints are classified as “abuse of authority” (20 percent of grievances), and “ethnic slurs” (5 percent to 8 percent).
Depending on how you look at it, Gregory Garguilo drove into at least two and maybe three of these categories as he headed home from his job as a parking attendant on March 28 of this year.
It was 1 a.m and Garguilo, 28, was sitting at a light on Tenth Avenue, his car pointed north, he recalls. Another sedan, crawling along 59th Street, turned south on Tenth. Then, suddenly, it screeched a U and roared up behind the bewildered Garguilo. Mysterious men came running at his car, one with a gun drawn, yelling “get the fuck out of the car.” Garguilo recalls. The terrified Garguilo immediately complied. The men, who still had not identified themselves, demanded, “Where the fuck did you steal the car?” “Asshole” and “fuck” he says, were part of every sentence. “They were very angry. I kept saying I was the owner. The one holding the gun said if I opened my mouth again he was going to bash it in.”
Garguilo says the plainclothes cops falsely accused him of running a red light, and he mentioned so in the complaint he filed at the police station. Yet when a revised version of his report was mailed back to him, his claim had been deleted. Garguilo, a clean-cut, serious young man who drives into Manhattan every day from his home in Tappan (where many cops live), can only guess why the police even stopped him. “The cops had a hunch,” he says with a shrug, “and their adrenaline gets going.”
SPARRING PARTNERS
When citizens complain about cops, PBA lawyers know how to counter. Legal Aid attorney Scott Ciment says when a citizen is charged with assaulting a police officer, its a good bet in many cases that police are covering up their own abuses. “Often assault will be the only charge,” Ciment says. “Why were they arrested in the first place? Not that many people go around assaulting cops.” Indeed, many people who have brought civil brutality suits say that when they filed a complaint, the police filed a cross suit, alleging assault. Attorneys familiar with such cases say the strategy is common to defuse the original suit, hoping both parties will agree to drop charges.
Sometimes, cops move to protect themselves well before anyone’s day in court. Another Legal Aid attorney, David Rountree, was at the Transit District 3 precinct last year, inside the subway station at 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, waiting for a lineup. An officer brought in a handcuffed suspect with a badly bloodied face. Rountree alleges that the desk sergeant, who appeared to know the suspect, remarked to him that he “must have fallen down the stairs.” The officers present chuckled. After they’d locked him up, the arresting officer came out, and, according to Rountree, the sergeant said, “What do you think you’re doing? I don’t think we can send that guy downtown looking like that.” Then, the EMS arrived and stitched him up.
On a separate occasion, Rountree represented a man who’d been arrested with one or two vials of crack and a small amount of marijuana—misdemeanors—in Times Square. At his arraignment, the man—who had no prior arrests, lived with his parents and worked in a music instrument store—sported a classic shiner. When the judge inquired where it came from, Rountree explained that his client had been thrown to the ground by a rookie officer and kicked in the face with a boot. The D.A. then interjected, in an on-the-record comment, that he had been prepared to charge the defendant with a noncriminal violation, but based on these allegations of police brutality, he would not make that offer.
Ciment says the D.A. will interview someone who makes allegations of police brutality, but can turn those statements against the defendant at his trial. Furthermore, he says that even if defendants are acquitted, confirming that they were indeed victims of brutality, the D.A. will frequently drop all interest in the brutality charge.
Most people won’t sue. If they do anything, they will seek redress from the CCRB. But brutality cases slip through like fine grains in a large-bore sieve. Even in the coarsest, most publicized cases, the complainants are rarely satisfied. For the enormous number of people who feel they’ve been unjustly insulted, humiliated, slurred, intimidated, terrorized, beaten, etc., the bottom line is low indeed: almost no cop is ever meted “serious justice” when citizens charge them with abuse. (The police department’s Internal Affairs Division simply doesn’t deal with most abuse situations.) “Even when officers are found guilty of using excessive force,” Newsday found in 1991, “the penalty many receive is a one-week suspension—the same punishment given to an officer who accepts two free doughnuts from a restaurant, wears a turtleneck while in uniform, or is discourteous to a supervisor.”
Even in well-publicized, outrageous cases like Judith Regan’s, getting justice is not easy. In 1990, Regan, a pregnant Simon & Schuster editor, told officers to stop taunting her cab driver. She was yanked from the vehicle, thrown against the side, handcuffed and taken to a police station. There, she was held—still manacled tightly—for five hours and barraged with threats and lewd and anti-Semitic remarks. Cops asked Regan, an Irish-Italian Catholic, what her name was. “Judith,” she replied. No, said a cop, “Jew bitch.” The rough treatment threatened Regan’s pregnancy; she suffered internal bleeding.
“The CCRB, which is one of the biggest jokes in the world, cleared them of any wrongdoing,” she recalls. The D.A.’s office wasn’t much better. “They have to get along with the police. It’s all political. They issued a press release saying basically that they did not have enough evidence to prosecute me so they were dropping the charges, implying that I must have done something wrong. The D.A. didn’t want to help me, they wanted me to go away.”
“I was a very bad example: a mother, in a nice outfit, in a nice job. They couldn’t call me a menace, or a drug addict.” Regan says she was harassed afterwards for a long time; a retired officer even called her husband, thinking he was an ex-husband, digging for dirt.
Regan sued, and the city recently paid her a six-figure amount in settlement. However, not a single officer was publicly disciplined.
CCRB: CIVILIAN COMPLAINT REJECTION BOARD?
Judith Regan’s “joke,” the Civilian Complaint Review Board, is made up of six civilians appointed by the mayor, and six NYPD civilian staffers. A majority of its investigators are uniformed cops. William Kuntz, a CCRB appointed member from 1987 until he resigned five months ago, found the coziness troubling. For example, he didn’t much like the board relying on legal opinions from NYPD attorneys, or its deference to the department.
The Tompkins Square report shows the rift between civilian and police members of the CCRB. “You should have seen the Tompkins Square report before I got my hands on it,” says Kuntz, now a Wall Street lawyer. “If I and some other civilian members of the board hadn’t been as forceful in putting out that what happened in Tompkins Square Park was disgraceful, it would have been very different.”
The most devastating evidence of CCRB’s failure came in a 1990 report on the Tompkins Square “Incident,” issued by the New York Civil Liberties Union. NYCLU reviewed the cases of several bystanders who were shown on videotape being bludgeoned by police: fewer than one dozen were charged. but not one was convicted.
Of 143 allegations of abuse and brutality in the park. CCRB substantiated 29, but was unable to identify the cops involved. One reason: the NYPD refuses to take profile shots of its officers. After the Tompkins Square report came out, the CCRB recommended that the department snap full frontal, left and right profile shots of all officers. The NYPD, however, rejected the advice, arguing that the shots would essentially treat cops like criminals. (Another proposal, that I.D. numbers be painted on riot helmets, was accepted.)
Worse, though the board recommends, the police commissioner chooses the punishment. Of 143 allegations, only one officer received internal discipline by the department of more than 30 days suspension. To boot, on that rare occasion when the CCRB dared whimper, the cops simply ignored it: Commissioner Ward let her off with a one-year suspension, instead of firing her, as the board recommended. The board’s sleuths themselves leave something to be desired when it comes to investigating their buddies’ behavior. One Legal Aid attorney recalls an interview between CCRB investigators and her client: “They sounded more like they were grilling a suspect than taking a report.”
Johnston, a former CCRB commissioner and ex-Des Moines district attorney now in private practice in Manhattan, agrees there’s a problem: “There’s nothing about being a street police officer that qualifies anyone to be an investigator.”
Under mounting pressure, the review board has begun to make wheezy, but slightly discernible adjustments. Only two months ago did it publish a brochure in Spanish. And members are for the first time starting to emerge from their cocoon to attend community board meetings.
LIFE IN THE BLUE BUBBLE
Nothing moves a cop into high gear like a Code 1013 call, Officer Needs Assistance. But mutual support extends to what many call the Blue Wall of Silence, the unwillingness to rat on a fellow officer. Some equate it to the Mafia’s omerta, a blood oath.
Based on his trial experiences, attorney Meyerson breaks the bulk of officers into three groups: Those who don’t see what they see, others who tell a half-truth, and still others who outright lie about what they see. “Any police officer’s word is no more intrinsically credible than anybody else’s word,” says Meyerson. “Police officers will lie as readily as anybody else.”
“Coupled with the 10 percent of cops [who may be regularly abusive], you have an excruciatingly difficult problem that can’t be resolved by the most progressive police commissioner,” says Meyerson.
Cops are encouraged to see themselves as different from everyone else. “Because of the aura assigned to police officers by American society, officers have trouble understanding police work is a job, not a way to spend an entire life,” says Guy Seymour, chief psychologist for the city of Atlanta, which is noted for its progressive policing. Seymour, an expert on police behavior, says cops often have trouble separating the rest of their existence from their work.
”People say, ‘I’m a police officer 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,'” notes Seymour. “But that’s not true, it’s just that society sees them that way. If we could get police to look at their work more dispassionately, the way a good carpenter looks at his handiwork, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems.”
Anger and aggression, which build when cops feel they’re not accorded all the respect they deserve, spill over from their work to their personal lives, spawning a pattern of divorce and domestic violence.
“It comes from being accustomed to having people do what you say, and living your life so that you always want to be in control,” Seymour says.
Interestingly, much of the aggression takes place after a suspect has been subdued, suggesting that cops are not trained to deal with the adrenaline rush that comes from the chase. Andrew Vachss, who had broad experience with police as chief of a maximum security institution for violent youth and as a probation officer, cites the Rodney King case, in which King was immobilized before cops beat him. Vachss says that whenever cops have a confrontation involving physical injury to either party, cops are always treated for ‘trauma.’ “That’s an attempt to decompress them.”
Seymour believes police need to learn how to be negotiators and mediators—the opposite of the police academy, where the emphasis is on getting and maintaining control at all costs.
PBA: POLICE BREASTBEATERS ALLIANCE?
Besides better training, Seymour says police need closer supervision—by bosses who are not their buddies. Supervisors and line cops are both members of the PBA, which vociferously opposes independent controls. PBA successfully waged a fear campaign in 1966 that transformed the newly created CCRB from an all-civilian to an all-cop board. David Garth, the consultant who co-chaired the pro-civilian side, recalls the onslaught.
“We had everybody from the entire establishment, but it didn’t make much difference,” he says. “We got killed.”
Attorney Meyerson, who handles police abuse cases, blames outfits like the PBA, and its head, Phil Caruso, for an ostrich act that debilitates New York. “The greatest disservice Caruso does is to his membership, because Phil Caruso should be talking about the investment of great deals of money into psych services in this department, into new recruitment structures, into early intervention and warning systems.”
ROLE MODELS, NOT ROBOCOP
Solutions and reforms worth trying are in no short supply. To broaden the fairly narrow, white, working-class base of the NYPD, Adam Walinsky, who served on the state’s Commission of Investigation, proposes funding college educations for those willing to commit to four years service as a cop. The goal: a more representative slice of the population, including people who don’t intend to stay on the force forever, and therefore view the job differently.
Alicea of the Hispanic officers association calls for more aggressive recruitment among Hispanics from within city limits and notes that the so-called recruitment unit has just one Latino doing outreach.
Since the late ’60s, when NYPD was a leader in developing risk management and stress reduction, the city has lagged badly. It might look to Atlanta’s computerized ‘early warning’ system, which ties in disparate sources of information within the police department—internal affairs records, personnel information and field performance reviews—to warn of officers headed for trouble.
As for diligently tracking complaints, Johnston believes the city ought to be developing a comprehensive career path for civilian investigators that would cover all city agencies, not the limited number the current Department of Investigation oversees. And he advocates using undercover monitors to help identify abusive officers.
That’s just a slice of the advice pie. But nothing changes unless it comes from on high. “Ultimately,” says Johnston, “the question is: Do you have the right chief, the right commissioner, the right mayor? If people feel the police are out of control, they must let the mayor know that’s going to be an issue in the election.” ❖
Research: Renuka Parthasarathi
