I guess Chicago gets the quality they want, even if it isn't easy.
September 25, 2006
Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker may be a Rhodes Scholar but he has something to learn about appointing a police director — esp ecially when he comes from the NYPD. Check behind the man’s resume.
Newark’s city council — which must confirm Booker’s appointee, the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner of Operations, Garry McCarthy — also has something to learn.
Last week, the council approved $157, 369 from a non-profit group to pay the consulting firm of former NYPD commissioner Howard Safir. First, is it coincidence that Safir promoted McCarthy from the mid-level command position of inspector to the exalted title of deputy commissioner?
Second, Safir — whose firm is to aid the Newark police department in a city that is largely black — was the NYPD’s commissioner in 1999 when four white cops fired 41 bullets at the unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo. The shooting provoked month-long demonstrations outside One Police Plaza and left a reservoir of ill-will in the city’s minority communities.
Third, emblematic of his general insensitivity to any police issue other than reducing crime, Safir pleaded a “scheduling conflict” to avoid testifying at a city council hearing about the shooting. Some conflict. The night before the hearing, he was spotted on national television at the Oscars in Hollywood.
McCarthy, too, has something to learn — about knowing when to hold’ em and when to fold ‘em.
No, we’re not suggesting he withdraw as police director, a job for which he still appears to have a fighting chance. Nor are we referring to his arrest in February, 2005, by the Palisades Interstate Parkway police following his actions one can view as either aberrational or illustrative of his character.
Rather it’s what he did after his arrest; his decision to fight the charges rather than walk away as Chief of Department Joe Esposito advised him when McCarthy telephoned Espo after he’d been hand-cuffed and disarmed, for raising hell with the two arresting Palisades officers after one of them issued his daughter Kyla a parking ticket.
Instead of walking away — Take the ticket and get out of there as quickly as you can, wise old Joe told him — McCarthy tried to tough it out.
“Not guilty,” he, Kyla and his wife Regina [who was charged with excessive noise] belted out together in their first appearance at the Palisades Parkway traffic court. He and Regina subsequently appeared in court a half-dozen times, their antics reported in this column in delicious detail.
In finding McCarthy guilty of a minor traffic violation, the judge, Stephen Zaben, cited the fact that McCarthy had been drinking before the incident; noted that if McCarthy believed the cop who had ticketed Kyla to be an imposter as McCarthy claimed in his testimony, McCarthy should have contacted the Palisades Parkway police supervising officer before confronting the cop; stated that McCarthy, rather than the two arresting Palisades cops, had been the aggressor; and criticized Regina for grabbing her husband’s gun back from the two Palisades cops who had confiscated it.
Then, McCarthy insisted on appealing. Last week, Patrick Roma, a New Jersey Appellate Judge, affirmed Zaben’s guilty verdict, adding that McCarthy had “thrown his weight around” and used “extraordinarily poor judgment.”
And in words that may return to haunt him, he was quoted in the Newark Star Ledger — which has already questioned his appointment — saying that that the lesson he had learned about his arrest was “how not to run a police agency” — specifically, “poor candidate screening, an absolute lack of supervision, no discipline and poor policies within that agency.”
http://nypdconfidential.com/columns/2006/060925.html
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