I began NYPD Confidential online in 2005 when Newsday bailed out of NYC. The column gives voice to those who have none; exposes lying politicians and self-righteous public officials; and calls out the political correctness in the media. I’ll continue to try to report truths the powerful don’t want readers to know about, because contrary to President Donald Trump’s claim, the media is not the enemy of the people.
In recent months, this column has chronicled the feds’ divisive investigation of the 2014 police “chokehold” death of Eric Garner; reported on PBA president Pat Lynch’s refusal to criticize Gov. Andrew Cuomo for legitimizing the release of cop-killers by making their prison records more important than their crimes; and marveled at the metamorphosis of “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani into a shill for Trump, confirming the words of columnist Jimmy Breslin that the former mayor is “a small man in search of a balcony.”
This week, we turn to Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins’ letter to his sergeants about “the Ferguson Effect in the NYPD.” He called the mayor’s and the commissioner’s neighborhood policing policy, which was created to bring the cops and non-white communities closer, a “sham.”
Instead, he wrote, the results have emboldened “society’s miscreants . . . to verbally abuse and incite uniformed police officers, and believe it is okay to taunt them.”
While top NYPD officials call him Crazy Eddie, many in the department feel he speaks the truth. Said Lynch: “Sadly, this is the result of years of elected officials demonizing police officers and decriminalizing aberrant behavior . . . with their constant false narrative about police brutality.”
So what’s Lynch’s false narrative and the Ferguson Effect? Both stem from the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, by officer Darren Wilson, who is white. Together with Garner’s “chokehold” death, these deaths of black men by white officers have led to the narrative by politicians, activist citizens and the media that police across the country are killing unarmed black men willy-nilly.
The apparent racially discriminatory policies in Ferguson notwithstanding, the fact remains that after Wilson stopped him, Brown grabbed Wilson’s gun. That’s why Wilson shot him. And there is a medical interpretation that Garner may not have died from a chokehold after all.
You’ll rarely find those facts in most media accounts. Why is that?
