Well, here we are again!! Since our last
issue, there has been lots of mobilizing
around issues of kop brutality and
excessive force, including kops using
pepper spray indiscriminately and
shooting those nice new 9mm automatic
pistols at the drop of a hat. But,
according to news reports, we've got a
long way to go before anything really
changes!!
****
Witnesses in the complaint filed with the
Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB)
against 9th precinct kops Col-labro and
Van Aker in their beating of Lower East
Side writer Michael Carter (See SHADOW #39
for more--Ed.) have received notice that
the complaint has been investigated and
"substantiated" and has been forwarded to
the "Department Advocate" of the NYPD, who
is responsible for prosecuting
"administrative charges" against kops.
Though surprising because the CCRB almost
never finds that a complaint against a kop
is legitimate, this still means nothing
because an administrative hearing, unlike
a criminal hearing, is internal, and the
offending kops never suffer anything worse
than a warning or a few days suspension.
So far, a hearing date has not been set.
****
On January 24, about 100 cops packed a
courtroom (were they "on the job?") to
protest a plea bargain worked out for
three young men who found themselves in
the middle of a kop shoot-out (or should
we say "shoot-in?") which left 9th
precinct kop Keith Prunty paralyzed from
the waist down. As reported in SHADOW #37,
kops fired more than 30 shots to kill one
man during an alleged burglary of a deli
that sold drugs on East Third Street. Kops
arrested three others, all of whom were
un-armed, and it was not clear whether the
dead man was armed either. In their zeal
to kill, kops fired in each other's
direction, and SHADOW sources later
revealed that Prunty was shot twice by his
own partner, Gerald Derby. Judge Shea took
all of this into account and gave the
three men less than half of the maximum
sentences they could have re-ceived if
they had gone to trial. According to the
Daily News, Derby could only say, "It's a
disgrace." Prunty declined to comment.
**** 
On January 24, former NYC Transit
Patrolman's Benevolent Association head
Ron Reale was indicted for racketeering
and bribery. Also indicted were four
others including James Lysaght and 
Peter Kramer, lawyers not only for the
Transit PBA, but also the 38,800 mem-
ber NYPD's PBA with which they merged in
1995. The law firm of Lysaght and Kramer
is paid over $5 mil-lion each year in
taxpayer money and union dues to defend
city police officers, and has handled
numerous police bru-tality cases. The
lawyers are charged with demanding
kickbacks from other lawyers who
represented transit cops; two former vice
presidents of the Transit PBA, Frank
Richardone and Thomas Zicchetello, also
pleaded guilty to stealing union funds to
buy luxury cars.
****
On January 23, NYPD Deputy Inspector
Henry M. Krantz was suspended without pay
for alleged favoritism doled out by the
gun licensing office that he headed in
dispensing handgun permits. 
****
A memo issued in the January/February
bulletin of the NYPD Detectives bureau
called upon every precinct detective squad
to have on file in their precinct a copy
of the most current yearbook for each
junior and senior high school in its
command. While Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
defended the policy by saying: "somebody
would have to show me what the
constitutional right is in having your
picture in a yearbook protected and kept
confidential," Principal Allen Liebowitz
of New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn has
declined to furnish the police with a
yearbook asking: "Why should every
youngster in the community...be in a
police lineup?"
****
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has appointed
Tosano J. Simonetti, who until March,
1997, was deputy commissioner of the NYPD,
to a seat on the Civilian Com-plaint
Review Board. In appointing for-mer police
second-in-command Simonetti to the CCRB,
which investigates complaints of police
misconduct, Giuli-ani removed Raymond J.
Aab, who had served on the CCRB for almost
four years and who had recently defied
Giuli-ani by challenging an NYPD plan to
in-troduce the use of hollow point bullets
by NYPD officers. 
****
Jose Antonio Sanchez, 56, a cook at a
social club in Corona, Queens, was shot
and killed on February 22 by underco-ver
police who had come to investigate reports
of liquor being served illegally at the
club. Cops claim that Sanchez came at them
with a knife, but it is not clear whether
Sanchez, an immigrant from the Dominican
Republic who spoke lit-
tle English, understood that the
non-uniformed officers were cops.
***
In Harlem on February 13, two NYPD   
narcotics officers responding to a report
of gunfire between gang members shot and
seriously wounded Juval Green, 17, and
Robert Reynoso, 18. No guns were recovered
at the scene, and lawyers for the wounded
youths claim that they were bystanders
when the Officers Frank Serevedio and Jose
Borrero fired 13 shots at them. The names
of the offi-cers involved were not
released until 15 days after the shooting.
***
In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, on March 19,
police gassed and clubbed a crowd of young
African-Americans who had ga-thered to bid
farewell to murdered hip-hop star
Christopher G. Wallace, a.k.a. Notorious
B.I.G. Cops claimed that 
some of the spectators at the funeral
procession danced on top of cars to
B.I.G.'s music and drank beer and
champagne in public, thus provoking the
discharge of pepper spray into the crowd
and the beating of several peo-ple, one of
whom was repeatedly struck in the head
with a large can of pepper gas. Julia
Campbell, a reporter from the New York
Times, was gassed and arrest-ed for
allegedly pushing a kop and en-couraging
others to resist the kops; the charges
against her were later dis-missed. 
***
At about 3:30 A.M. on the morning of April
6, police responding to a call of a fracas
at a party on 162nd Street and Amsterdam
Avenue shot 16 year old Kevin Cedeno in
the back. Initial re-ports by the police
said that Cedeno had rushed at the cops
with a machete, but a report by the New
York City medical examiner confirmed
witness re-ports that Officer Anthony
Pellegrini had shot him in the back.
Witnesses to the shooting maintain that
Cedeno, a West Indian youth, was fleeing a
mob of Dominicans who had confronted him
at the party when the cops arrived. The
incident provoked a demonstration of a
thousand Washington heights communi-ty
residents on April 10.
****
On March 21, Bronx cops shot 48 year old
Donald Davidson six times, killing him,
after responding to a 911 call from his
daughter reporting that her father "had
become argumentative and needed to be
hospitalized." The police claim that
Davidson had attacked them with a kitchen
knife, but the same family mem-
bers who had summoned them maintain that
Davidson was shot twice in the back by the
cops while attempting to flee a cloud of
pepper spray. Adrienne Matthews, Davidson's
daughter, said that when she opened the door
the cops were standing there holding styrofoam
cups of coffee and that one of them said: "I'm on
my coffee break; this better be good."
****
The NYPD has announced the intention to
switch to a stronger form of pepper spray
by the end of 1997. The inflam-matory gas,
which is made from an ex-tract of cayenne
pepper, has been used to disperse
demonstrators in situations ranging from
Lower East Side squatter demonstrations to
protests by City Uni-versity students over
tuition increases. Complaints about use of
the spray rose 254% between 1994 and 1995.
Several cases are on record of people who
have been sprayed with the chemical later
dying while in police custody.
****
On April 17, the New York Times reported
that former NYPD narcotics detective
Constantine Chronis, who is free on
$200,000 bail on charges that he helped
another man beat Shane Daniels, a young
African American, into a coma in a
Westhampton Beach, Long Island parking
lot, is attempting to have his charges
dismissed. Chronis stands accused of
having held his service revol-ver on a
group of Shane Daniel's friends as
Chronis' drinking buddy and fellow body
builder Austin Offen pum-meled Daniels
with a steel steering wheel lock. Chronis'
lawyer maintains that Chronis' action in
holding Daniels' potential defenders at
gunpoint was an attempt to break up a
"brawl." Daniels still suffers from lost
peripheral vision in one eye and walks
with a limp.
***
An Allegheny Pennsylvania judge ruled on
April 22 that two white cops who had been
accused of beating Black motorist Johnny
Gammage to death in 1995 should not be
tried for involuntary manslaughter. Judge
David Cashman ruled that the prosecutor
"had bowed to public pressure" in filing
charges against former Lieutenant Milton
Mulholland and officer Michael Albert.
Gammage, who was driving a Jaguar through
the exclusive Pittsburgh suburb of
Brent-wood, was stopped because police saw
his brake lights flashing. When he emerged
from the car, he was carrying a cellular
telephone that the cops claim to have
mistaken for a weapon. The cops 
pinned Gammage to the pavement causing him
to suffocate from pressure to his head and
neck.
****


****
When you're surfing the internet, check out
the Global Kop Watch site run by SHADOW
Kop-Watchers. You can share experiences
and kop photos with the rest of the world.
The address is:    
http://mediafilter.org/globocop.
****
If you have anything to share with
Kop-Watch (reports, photos, undercover kop
car license plates, etc.), please send it
to: The SHADOW, P.O. Box 20298, New York,
NY 10009, Attn: Kop-Watch