In real life, on-duty police officers rarely, if ever, pull the trigger. In 2015, the NYPD’s 36,000 officers fired their weapons a total of 67 times. Before joining the SNEU, [Richard] Haste worked foot patrol and then “midnight conditions,” cruising Wakefield in an unmarked sedan in the middle of the night. Last March, Haste’s complaint record was leaked to the press. Six official complaints had been made against him: abuse during a frisking, use of physical force, use of pepper spray, and three incidents of verbal discourtesy. None of the incidents resulted in anything more than mediation. Just 7 percent of NYPD officers have received six or more complaints. But Haste argues that it would be extremely rare for a cop with 175 arrests in three years not to have complaints on his record.
Haste’s parents divorced when he was 5, and he spent most of his childhood in Pelham Bay, a white working-class neighborhood four miles southeast of Wakefield. Haste was an outsider in school, he says, but during his junior year in high school, he became an auxiliary officer with the NYPD, inspired by cultural touchstones of the ’80s and ’90s like Rambo, Top Gun, and G.I. Joe. He committed to the Marines before graduating from high school, and after two years on bases in Okinawa and California, he was honorably discharged because of an injury. He moved back to New York and was eventually accepted into the force, his dream job.
Not long after the shooting, Haste started to feel acute stress. He’d begun to be recognized in public and was receiving enough credible death threats that the NYPD installed a panic button in his home. He saw a department-appointed psychologist, but union representatives told him he couldn’t trust anybody. As Internal Affairs investigated him, his co-workers, who were also his best friends, stopped talking to him. After a brief suspension, he was assigned to the Fleet Services division in Queens, where he spent his days babysitting gas pumps. He stopped sleeping, and when he did, he saw Graham in his dreams, dead on a gurney, the scars of the medical examiner’s Y-incision on his chest.
The Bronx district attorney convened a grand jury, and on June 13, 2012, Haste’s 31st birthday, he was indicted on first- and second-degree manslaughter charges. The arraignment was the first time Constance Malcolm and Frank Graham had seen Haste in person; they wept as Haste quietly pleaded not guilty. After posting bail, he emerged from the Bronx Hall of Justice to the applause of fellow police officers, a scene that would make one City Council member wonder later to me, “Is there something about the culture of the Police Department that hardens your heart?”
Underlying that culture is an understanding that police officers who pull the trigger in the line of duty have the nearly absolute deference of the criminal-justice system. Historically, the U.S. hasn’t kept official numbers on officer-involved shootings, but it’s estimated police shoot and kill about 1,000 people a year. Philip Stinson, a former police officer and associate professor at Bowling Green State University, tracks incidents of police misconduct. According to his database, which dates back to 2005, Haste is one of only 82 on-duty officers who have shot and killed someone to be charged with murder or manslaughter. A mere 29 of those were convicted of manslaughter or a lesser charge, and just one has been convicted of murder.
…
In May 2013, nearly a year after Haste’s arraignment, the judge who presided over the grand jury called a conference and announced that the assistant district attorney had erred when he instructed jurors not to consider Haste’s “state of mind,” including the fact that Horne had told him Graham had a gun. And so the judge threw out the initial indictment. From the second row of the courtroom, Malcolm began yelling at the judge. “He killed my child. What more can you do to me?”
Less than two months later, the Bronx district attorney convened a second grand jury, confident that, absent any major prosecutorial gaffe, he could secure a reindictment. The second grand jury, like the first, reflected the demographics of the Bronx, which, to Haste’s supporters, meant reindictment was inevitable. Haste testified for five hours. [Attorney] London believed his client was better prepared for his second testimony. “When they asked Officer Haste, ‘What were you thinking right before you shot the one bullet?,’ he said things like, ‘I envisioned Thanksgiving and everyone is there but me.’ ”
The grand jury declined to reindict, a decision that shocked both London and the Bronx DA’s office. Hours after the second grand jury’s decision went public, then–U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced that his office would review the case to see if Graham’s civil rights had been violated. Under Obama, the Department of Justice had aggressively pursued civil-rights investigations into police agencies that had exhibited patterns of abuse, but it rarely opened cases against individuals; more often than not, it took positions that strengthened officers’ right to use deadly force. A year passed without word from the DOJ. In August 2014, Constance Malcolm and Frank Graham delivered 33,000 signatures gathered in an online petition to the U.S. Attorney’s office demanding an indictment. On February 2, 2016, the four-year anniversary of Ramarley’s death, Malcolm and Graham, joined by some 50 activists, slept on the steps of the U.S. Attorney’s office in the bitter cold. Bharara agreed to meet with Malcolm, but, in early March, he told her that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute. To make such a case against a police officer, the prosecution must prove a “willful deprivation of rights,” an extremely high burden of proof. Later that day, Bharara issued a statement: “Neither accident, mistake, fear, negligence nor bad judgment is sufficient to establish a federal criminal civil-rights violation.”
Malcolm, who moved here from Jamaica as a 13-year-old in the mid-’80s, speaks with a slight patois and occasionally slips into the present tense when talking about the past. The effect, when she talks about Ramarley, is that Malcolm’s grief isn’t lost in translation but magnified by it. “Ramarley’s actually kind of shy,” she says. She still hasn’t figured out how to respond to people who ask how many children she has, and she still lives in the apartment where her son was killed, with Chinnor and Hartley.
The family avoids speaking about Ramarley at home, but as a leader in the movement for police reform, Malcolm has found a way to talk about her son almost daily. In the week after the shooting alone, she met with politicians, Commissioner Kelly, and activists from police-reform organizations; made an appearance at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network; and led hundreds of protesters in a march to the 47th Precinct. She’s also taken to mentoring mothers of other unarmed black men killed by police, the “little girls’ group that we didn’t ask for.” After Ramarley was killed, Malcolm, who works as a nurse’s aide, took more than a year off from her job. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic-stress disorder. Chinnor, now 11, went to therapy for a while. “I don’t know if he’ll ever be a normal kid, seeing what he saw,” Malcolm says.
We talked for an hour before Malcolm calmly walked me down the hallway where Haste and Graham first encountered each other and into the “famous bathroom,” as she called it. Standing next to the bathtub, Malcolm showed me how, if Ramarley’s boot had been sticking out of the bathroom door when he died, as multiple witnesses attest, she thinks he would have been standing too far from the toilet for anyone to reasonably claim that he’d been throwing a bag of weed into the bowl. Malcolm believes that officers may have planted the weed to fortify Haste’s account.
Malcolm talks about her suspicion as an afterthought; she knows there’s no way to prove a cover-up, and even if there were, her legal recourse has all but dried up. In 2015, the city settled a civil suit with the family for $3.9 million. Malcolm calls it “blood money.” It sits in an account she says she’s never touched. After the suit was settled, with no hope of a state or federal trial, she focused on the fight to get Haste off the police force, a goal so narrow that it was mostly symbolic, as well as on getting more information about what had happened that day. She still knew shockingly little. … (Walsh 5).
In March 2016, federal prosecutors declined to file civil rights charges, closing the pathway to criminal indictment. Haste did, however, have a departmental trial this past January.
Haste’s disciplinary trial consisted of five days of testimony from 11 witnesses: NYPD investigators, inspectors, trainers and the other officers from the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit (SNEU) he was a member of. Noticeably absent from the witness list were any civilians, including Graham’s grandmother and Dixon, the downstairs neighbor.
Without civilian testimony, the NYPD shaped the entire narrative, consistently referring to Graham as “the perp” and an “imminent threat.” They cast him “walking with a purpose” and placing his hands in his waistband as suspicious, furtive, criminal behavior. The defense, multiple police witnesses and even the prosecution repeatedly suggested that Graham had been armed. Defense attorney Stuart London, contracted by the NYPD police union, insinuated that Graham was responsible for his own demise by not complying with Haste’s command to show his hands.
…
“A longstanding tradition in the police department is the ‘evolving narrative,’ which is more widely known as ‘testilying,’” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in an interview. “[Police officers] will often tell one story to their colleagues and supervisors immediately after an incident, and another as evidence emerges that pokes holes in their original narratives.” Though the “evolving narrative” practice is widely known, says Warren, “cops are also generally considered to be more credible than other witnesses when there are discrepancies.”
Malcolm says Haste’s departmental trial was difficult for her to witness. “It was hard to sit there and listen to them talking and how they were characterizing my son…basically like he’s a thug,” Malcolm told Colorlines. “This person they were describing wasn’t my son.”
Also painful for the family was the extent to which the police narrative erased Graham’s grandmother and little brother. Family members called out, “[Patricia Hartley] is right here!” when Haste testified that he didn’t know who was in the house when he shot Graham. “I can’t take these lies!” Hartley exclaimed during Haste’s testimony.
“In the trial, you hear about Ramarley and Richard Haste, you hear nothing about my mom and my [younger] son. And they were in the house,” says Malcolm. “It was my mom that was screaming in the court, because she felt like she didn’t exist. And they were telling that story that wasn’t true.”
The erasure of civilian witnesses also meant that the danger and abuse Hartley faced were not addressed. “He could have shot [my mother,]” says Malcolm, who believes that Haste should also have faced endangerment charges. “You didn’t hear that in the trial.”
One particular absurdity may explain the court’s omissions: Haste was not facing discipline for killing an unarmed teenager. The NYPD Firearms Discharge Review Board had already determined that the shooting itself was justified, which had the effect of taking that charge off the table. He was instead tried for using poor tactical judgment leading up the fatal shot (Marlowe and Myers 5-6).
Haste said he asked [his attorney] London what had changed since May 2015, when the department had floated him a deal that opened a return to active duty. (The offer was quickly rescinded when the NYPD official who made it found out Haste was under federal investigation.) “[London’s] answer was simply, ‘They’re caving into political pressure from activist groups,’ ” Haste told me. Upset by the way tabloids had portrayed him, Haste wanted a chance to tell the public what he’d told the second grand jury, his final-frame analysis. He chose the trial.
…
Firing Haste would require some litigatory gymnastics. The NYPD needed to craft an argument that was the perfect negative of final-frame analysis, in that it would have to prove that his actions leading up to the shooting merited dismissal regardless of the consequences, as the Firearms Discharge Review Board investigation had already cleared Haste for pulling the trigger. … the NYPD chose “poor tactical judgment,” a catchall charge they could apply to any number of the choices Haste made that day. …
The departmental trial was held over five days at police headquarters late this past January, during which both the defense and prosecution picked apart everything the SNEU did wrong that day: Haste didn’t have the 20 hours of classroom training required of all SNEU members; there weren’t enough officers on duty; Haste should have been in uniform. But the heart of the department’s argument against its own officer was based on the moment Graham entered his home, which transformed Haste’s pursuit into a “barricaded job,” at which point an officer is required to call for an Emergency Services Unit. Instead, Haste chose to enter the home of a possibly armed suspect without calling for backup. Taken together, those actions, the department charged, constituted “poor tactical judgment.” The head of the Police Academy’s specialized training said that he’d never seen such egregious tactical violations. Meanwhile, Mcloughlin and Morris testified on Haste’s behalf. Morris, the team leader, backed up Haste, saying he trusted him to make the right decisions. (The NYPD asserts that blame should also be placed on Morris for failing to control his team; both he and Mcloughlin will face their own departmental trials.)
On March 24, a Friday, Haste was told that the judge had recommended dismissal, and O’Neill planned on following through with her recommendation. That Sunday, Haste submitted his resignation. …
Last year, Haste graduated from Pace with a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies, with a concentration in criminal justice, and he has applied to jobs at federal and local law-enforcement agencies; a few have called him back. He believes Malcolm has every right to be angry and always felt that she deserved an open investigation, one in which he was free to answer any questions she had for him. But he stands by his final-frame analysis — even if the department that trained him, that shaped his worldview in the course of that training, has forsaken him. Haste still thinks pulling the trigger was the right thing to do. Ramarley Graham no longer shows up in his dreams.
The day after Haste resigned, Malcolm held a press conference outside police headquarters in downtown Manhattan. She stepped up to the microphone wearing a gray scarf and a white T-shirt that said WHERE IS MY JUSTICE? above a picture of Ramarley’s face. She had gotten some version of the accountability she had sought — after all, Haste was off the force, disgraced, and there was a credible argument to be made that it was Malcolm’s own activism that forced the issue. Yet the closure she imagined a resolution would bring seems, if anything, farther away than ever. Federal suits against the officers who killed Garner and Rice are now being handled by a Justice Department that has already moved to cut back the Obama administration’s police-reform initiatives. Still, Malcolm needs to believe that her son’s life force didn’t stop when and where that hollow-point bullet did. “This was the perfect case to show us that our young men and women matter,” she said, looking out at the crowd. “Ramarley’s life matters” (Walsh 6-8).
What makes Graham’s case endemic is what it says about the NYPD’s culture. The family’s civil suit notes street stops increased seven-fold between 2002 and 2012, disproportionately targeting non-White neighborhoods. When it came to bias influenced by race, gender and age, “Ramarley fit to a tee.”
Allegations of racial bias were substantiated in the landmark 2013 decision in Floyd v. the City of New York, which found that the NYPD had a pattern of racial profiling and used monthly quota systems to push cops to conduct stops, searches and summons. Graham’s civil suit surfaced one method that officers used to fulfill their quotas—a practice known as “next up.”
“The defendants engaged in a system or practice wherein officers would rotate arrests and who would catch them. That way all members of the ‘team’ would meet their numbers,” the lawsuit states, continuing that, “On February 2, 2012, at approximately 3:00 p.m., Haste was ‘next up.’”
“Quotas and how they are incentivized have the effect of generating police activity even when none is called for,” says CCR’s Warren. Even worse, says Warren, is that “next up” encourages team members to compete. “Incentives like this create solutions in search of problems. And the ‘problems’ are members of Black and Brown communities.”
Adding to the dangerous backdrop of Graham’s fatal shooting was what a 2015 investigation by the city’s Office of the Inspector General described as a “vague and imprecise” use-of-force policy and officers who were not sufficiently trained to de-escalate situations.
The study named race as a factor in who was on the receiving end of the NYPD’s use of force. Over half of complaints about excessive force were from Blacks, who represent less than a quarter of the city’s population. And, in more than 35 percent of substantiated complaints of unwarranted excessive force, the NYPD failed to discipline the cops responsible.
Police unions also contribute to the corrosive climate. In a January 13, 2017, investigative report, Reuters found that 82 cities hold police union contracts that protect officers with complaints lodged against them. In 46 of those cities, including New York City, the protection involves erasing disciplinary records. NYPD officers who undergo a disciplinary trial resulting in a verdict other than “guilty” may petition to have their record expunged after two years.
All this plays into a culture of policing where, according to the civil suit, police officers felt that they were free to conduct baseless stop-and-frisks, enter civilians’ homes without probable cause, use unnecessary and excessive force, intimidate witnesses, and engage in a conspiracy, or “blue wall of silence,” to file false reports or give false statements. Cops, alleged the suit, used catchall phrases such as “furtive movements,” or “displayed what appeared to be a gun” to justify unconstitutional conduct that went unpunished by their supervisors.
This is the police culture that prompted Haste and his colleagues to tail Graham, kick down his door and fatally shoot him. It is the same culture that Malcolm encountered watching Haste testify without observing any sign of remorse. “That was his opportunity to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he never really did that. Instead, he justified killing my son,” she told Colorlines (Marlowe and Myers 7-8).
Works cited:
Marlowe, Jen and Myers, Amy. “ 1 Teen, 6 Cops, 1 Bullet and 5 Years of a Black Family Screaming for Justice.” Colorlines, April 12, 2017. Net. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/1-teen-6-cops-1-bullet-and-5-years-black-family-screaming-justice
Walsh, James D. “The Bullet, the Cop, the Boy.” New York Magazine Intelligencer, June 2017. Net. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/ramarley-graham-nypd-shooting.html
No comments:
Post a Comment