KOP WATCH
Well, here we are again!! NYPD Commissioner/Mayor Giuliani flunky Howard Safir enjoys announcing regularly that incidents of abuse by police are down, citing the lower number of complaints registered with the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). The obvious reason for the fewer complaints is the public's lack of confidence in the CCRB, which does nothing about the cops being complained about. However, there is a way to accurately gauge an increase in police violence and abuse. According to New York Newsday, over the last three years, the city has paid out in excess of $66 million to settle more than 1,100 police brutality lawsuits. This is in comparison to the $72 million paid out over the entire seven years (1987-1993) prior to 1994. The total annual cost to taxpayers has risen from $9.9 million in 1992 to $22 million in 1996. The drug war came home to motorists caught in rush hour traffic on the West Side of Manhattan June 7 as Federal Customs agents set up a sting operation at a parking lot on 10th Ave. and 34th Street--which ended up in a gunfight. The shooting broke out after a gang of robbers sneaked up on the drug dealers who were the object of the sting, who were transferring the money to the agents, who were posing as money launderers. One robber was shot dead and a Customs agent was wounded. The federal cops chose to draw all of these gunmen together at a corner which is not only the gateway to the Lincoln Tunnel, but a busy industrial area at the end of the working day, all in the interest of law and order. On July 1, a grand jury decided that Officer Anthony Pellegrini was justified when he killed 16-year old Kevin Cedeno in Washington Heights on April 6. Pellegrini shot Cedeno in the back the cop and his partner responded to a gang fight between Dominican and West Indian youths on 162nd Street. Pellegrini singled out Cedeno after seeing a dark object protruding from his clothing, which Pellegrini claimed he thought was a gun. As Cedeno fled, Pellegrini shot him in the back. The dark object turned out to be a machete. Members of Cedeno's family are suing the NYPD. On May 2 a Brooklyn Grand Jury cleared Officers Keith Tierney and James Gentile of charges in the killing of Aswan Watson, whom they shot 18 times after he entered a stolen car that they were staking out. On June 13, 1996, the cops saw Aswan reaching for an object and opened fire--the object turned out to be a steel anti-theft device. Officer Paolo Colecchia has become just the third New York City police officer to sentenced to prison for homicide committed while on duty. He was sentenced to one and one half to four years in jail for killing Nathaniel Gaines, a black Persian Gulf War veteran and highway toll taker with no criminal record. Colecchia and an off-duty cop were picking on Gaines as he rode a subway train in the Bronx on July 4, 1996. First the off-duty cop told Colecchia, who was in uniform, that Gaines was carrying a gun. Colecchia stopped the train, patted Gaines down without arresting him, then released him when no gun was found. The off-duty cop, Colecchia, and Gaines continued riding and the off-duty cop told Colecchia that he suspected Gaines of stalking a woman, whereupon Colecchia pulled Gaines off the train. At a certain point, Gaines ran and was shot in the back repeatedly by Colecchia. In a rare move, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association has refused to pay for Colecchia's legal expenses. Former NYPD officer Francis Livoti, dismissed from his job but acquitted of criminal charges in the the 1994 choke hold killing of Anthony Baez, has been charged with misdemeanor assault and reckless endangerment for placing another young man in a choke hold. This charge dates from 1993, predating the Baez incident. Livoti is charged with grabbing Steven Resto by the neck after stopping him for riding a go cart on University Avenue in the Bronx. Resto maintains that the choke hold caused him pain, bruises, loss of breath, and difficulty in swallowing. On August 19, white Yonkers police officer Robert Clarke pleaded guily to having assaulted black news writer Ernest Campbell in a racially-motivated attack outside Madison Square Garden on March 27, 1996. Clark and his older brother Thomas, who is not a cop, were intoxicated as they left a Rangers game that night and pummelled Campbell to the ground, repeatedly calling him a nigger. Both of the Clark brothers received sentences of three years probation and 200 hours of community service. Officer Benjamin Rodriguez of the 79th Precinct in Brooklyn was placed on modified duty August 18 for an alleged sexual assault against a woman whom he had arrested. Rodriguez arrested the woman for disorderly conduct after a domestic dispute at her house in which she reportedly threw an object at her husband. At the station, the woman reported, Officer Rodriguez groped her and forced her to perform oral sex--repeating the sexual harassment in several different areas of the precinct house. Another cop at the precinct is corroborating the woman's story. Members of the newly-formed Black Panther Organization have taken to the streets of Washington Heights with high-end video cameras to videotape the actions of police officers. The cameras, equipped with telephoto lenses enabling the Panthers to keep a safe distance, were purchased with a grant from the William Kunstler Memorial Fund. Fifty-seven confidential police reports containing phone numbers and addresses of crime victims were found in a sidewalk litter basket in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on August 7. Many of the reports dealt with sex crimes, the victims of which are legally entitled not to have their names publicized. The NYPD has concluded that they were illegally deposited in the public garbage pail by an officer who was authorized by the department to take them home. Over a thousand taxi drivers paraded slowly from Fourteenth Street and Avenue D to City Hall on August 19 in protest against a police crackdown in which tickets have been eating up a third of some drivers' income. A number of the mostly Pakistani drivers told reporters of incidents in which cops used racial epithets and humiliated them in addition to issuing summonses for petty violations. An off-duty police sergeant driving with a blood alcohol level of 2.6 crashed his automobile into a livery cab, and, while trying to flee from the scene of the accident was shot to death during a struggle with irate onlookers in Jackson Heights, Queens. The bystanders forced their way in the back of the car and Sgt. Walker Fitzgerald pulled his service revolver on them. As they tried to disarm the drunken cop, who had been kicked out of a topless bar minutes earlier, the gun went off and killed Fitzgerald. A Jackson Heights man was arrested and charged with manslaughter. Trial has begun for Richard DiGuglielmo, a white police officer accused of the off-duty shooting of a black man over a parking space. DiGuglielmo, accused of shooting Charles Campbell, who had parked in front of a delicatessen run by the cop's father in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in order to buy a slice of pizza across the street. The elder DiGuglielmo regarded the parking space, which was on a public street, as his property and for his customers only; over twenty people had complained to Dobbs Ferry police that the deli owner had shouted racist or sexist slurs and even physically attacked them after they had parked in that same space. After an argument with Campbell, Officer DiGuglielmo ran inside the store, got his father's gun, and shot Campbell. DiGuglielmo is charged with second degree murder. New York Observer poll taken on September 4-7 revealed the following statistics about consciousness of police brutality in New York--54 percent of those [registered voters of all races] polled believed that incidents such as the torture of Abner Louima were not isolated incidents but part of a pattern of police abuse; 45 percent believe that such abuse is tolerated by precinct commanders in certain parts of the city. 80 percent of black and 71% of Latino registered voters said they believed that the Louima incident was part of a pattern of abuse. 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: KopWatch When your 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.