Police State Mindset Sees One-Year-Old and Mother as Threat
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
12 December 18
The mission of the New York City Police Department is to enhance the quality
of life in New York City by working in partnership with the community to
enforce the law, preserve peace, reduce fear, and maintain order. The
Department is committed to accomplishing its mission of protecting the lives
and property of all citizens of New York City by treating every citizen with
compassion, courtesy, professionalism, and respect..
- Mission and Values of NYPD, issued April 5, 2016
This mission was spectacularly NOT accomplished on Friday afternoon,
December 7, at a Brooklyn office of the city's HRA - Human Resources
Administration (irony presumably unintended). The stunningly abject failure
of police to live up to their professed mission featured several police
officers violently separating a one-year-old boy from his mother as she lay
on the floor crying for help. The end of the event was documented in a video
posted on Facebook the same day by a witness who commented:
So I'm At 275 Bergen Street Handling My Business Or Whatever & There Wasn't
Any More Chairs For This Lady To Sit Down So She Sat In The Corner On The
Floor. The Security Guard Came Over Said What Ever She Said To Her & She
Made The Security Guard Feel Dumb So She Called The Cops On Her & This Was
The Outcome SMH Mind You She Had Her Baby In Her Hands The Whole Time. I'm
So Fucking Disgusted with The NYPD. EVRYBODY PLEASE SHARE!!! I'm a mother
myself & I would've lost my fucking mind if this was me they would've had to
kill me
Here's what apparently happened, starting with the arrival of Jazmine
Headley, 23, at the HRA office, carrying her one-year-old son. She was there
to get a child care credit so that she could take a cleaning job. One
account has her waiting four hours. She had no place to sit but the floor.
None of the human resources workers offered her an extra chair. Instead, a
security guard told this woman holding an infant that she had to stand. When
Jazmine Headley refused to stand, the security guard or someone else called
the cops.
That might not have been a bad thing, since New York has recently started
training its police officers in de-escalation techniques that presumably
help to "preserve peace, reduce fear, and maintain order." How hard would it
have been to sort out a situation where a mother and child are waiting
patiently to get served? That really depends on the mindset of the
enforcement officers. The security guards had already escalated a non-event
into a confrontation. The NYPD officers, mostly (or all) women, turned it
into a human rights violation, an unjustified assault on both the mother and
the infant. When bystanders objected to the way the cops were acting, one of
the cops threatened the bystanders with a taser. A police spokesman later
refused to identify any of the cops involved or to say they had followed
proper protocols.
This really should have been a no-brainer for every authority figure
involved. A woman and her baby sitting in a corner pose what kind of threat
to whom? Who is responsible for the way the hired security guards impose
"order"? Where is the simple humanity of those who run a crowded "human
resources" office? What possible rationale does anyone have for demanding
that the woman stand with her child while she waits her turn? Why did the
police not de-escalate the non-threating situation instead of turning it
into a violent arrest of the mother and violent detention of the infant? No
wonder the video went viral and sparked widespread outrage.
Official response by higher-ups was little better and came days later. Mayor
Bill de Blasio tweeted that the police assault was "a disturbing incident."
The NYPD issued a statement calling the assault "troubling." The police
statement apparently misrepresented the sequence of events, claiming HRA
security "made unsuccessful attempts to remove this individual from the
facility due to her disorderly conduct towards others and for obstructing
the hallway." The NYPD statement includes this inconsistent passage:
The woman was then informed by police numerous times to leave the location,
and she refused. As NYPD officers were attempting to convince the woman to
depart the facility, HRA peace officers brought the woman to the floor. NYPD
officers then attempted to place her under arrest. She refused to comply
with officers' orders, and was then taken into custody.
She was "informed" to leave? Why? Did she not have every right to be there?
What right did any of the authorities have to raise this barrier to her
finding work when it was the job of at least some of them to help her? "HRA
peace officers brought the woman to the floor." What? She was standing, then
tackled? With a child in her arms? Then she was arrested for what,
littering? And why does the NYPD statement omit the child's existence, as
well as the assault on the child? After all, one of the charges against
Headley was "acting in a manner injurious to a child."
The bogus arrest of a young black woman on a Friday in Brooklyn didn't
generate much news coverage until the video went viral and public reaction
pushed it into the news on December 9. The next day NY Police Commissioner
James O'Neill tweeted:
As we investigate Friday's arrest in Brooklyn, I'll tell you the video is
very disturbing to me - as PC, & as a dad. Also, #NYPD cops have a very
tough job. We were called to a chaotic situation & we're looking at all
available video to determine why certain decisions were made.
The credible accounts available so far all suggest that if there was any
chaos, then the private security guards created it, and the NYPD made it
worse. Training in de-escalation - bringing a calming effect to an intense
situation - began about four years ago, after an NY police officer killed
Eric Garner with a stranglehold even though the underlying offense was
selling single cigarettes on the street. Eric Garner, 43, was an unarmed
black man and father of six when a gang of cops swarmed him. His last words
were: "I can't breathe." Garner's killer, Daniel Pantaleo, was not indicted
by a grand jury in 2014, but he still faces an internal police disciplinary
charge of using excessive force. Pantaleo's hearing started December 7, the
same day NY cops used Jazmine Headley to demonstrate that de-escalation
techniques have not yet taken hold, although there was no stranglehold and
Headley survived.
Pantaleo is defended by his police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent
Association. Union head Patrick Lynch responded to protesters that this
trial is a "kangaroo court." He accused the Civilian Complaint Review
prosecuting Pantaleo of rushing the 2014 case. Lynch was also quick to
absolve the police of any blame in tearing Jazmine Headley's baby from her
arms. Lynch said: "These police officers were put in an impossible
situation. They didn't create the dispute at the HRA office." Yes, that's
true as far as it goes. But it ignores the reality that the police made the
impossible situation into a disaster. Kind of reminds one of Chicago mayor
Richard Daley's exquisite malapropism during the 1968 police riots: "The
police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder."
Fifty years after the Chicago police riots, police violence remains an
American plague. Police executions of innocent, unarmed, usually non-white
victims continue to go unpunished. The same day Jazmine Headley became news,
The New York Times published a study of excessive police violence in
Phoenix. The piece starts with a cop roughing up and arresting a blind man
who "came too close" to him in a men's room. City officials did not dispute
the statistics showing Phoenix police were more violent than police in other
cities of similar size. Instead, the officials blamed Phoenix citizens,
based on no statistics or other evidence. When the Phoenix police chief
hired a non-profit research firm to study the violence issue, the Phoenix
police union called that "second-guessing police officers who have done
nothing wrong."
That's a police state mentality, the presumption that the police have done
nothing wrong, without evidence or analysis. Patrick Lynch of the NY police
union expressed the same poisonous attitude: "The event would have unfolded
much differently if those at the scene had simply complied with the
officers' lawful orders." The idea that we should obey the police whatever
they say is raw authoritarianism (in plain view in Poland these days at the
climate change conference there, where protest is contained and coal is
promoted). In a free country, police need to be as accountable as the rest
of us. And in the case of Jazmine Headley, accountability seems to have
begun.
On December 11, the Brooklyn district attorney dropped all charges against
her, saying:
I was horrified by the violence depicted in the video and immediately opened
an investigation into this case.. An HRA officer escalated the situation as
Ms Headley was about to leave the premises, creating an awful scenario of a
baby being torn from his mother. The consequences this young and desperate
mother has already suffered as a result of this arrest far outweigh any
conduct that may have led to it. She and her baby have been traumatized, she
was jailed on an unrelated warrant and may face additional collateral
consequences.
The same day, Headley was released from Rikers Island prison after five days
there. Ordering her release, Judge Craig S. Walker called her arrest a
"horrific scene that was broadcast all over the United States." While the
viral video and subsequent outcry influenced the judge, Headley had only
limited awareness of the media storm until she was released.
Headley was jailed because of a New Jersey warrant relating to credit card
fraud charges for which she had missed at least one court appearance. The NY
judge released her on her own recognizance, meaning that she did not have to
post bail but was expected to appear at a New Jersey hearing next week.
Brooklyn Defender Services, which has represented Headley, assured the judge
that she would appear as required. The agency has also filed a motion in New
Jersey asking for the dismissal of the charges there.
This represents partial justice of a sort for Jazmine Headley, but it's
hardly restorative or compensatory. Meanwhile, the police union's Patrick
Lynch continues to whine for police supremacy: "The immediate rush to
condemn these officers leaves their fellow cops wondering - when confronted
with a similar impossible scenario, what do you want us to do? The answer
cannot be 'do nothing.'"
What do we want police to do? Have they not been trained in de-escalation?
Are they not capable of making sensible, proportionate decisions? How
willing are they to live up to their mission of "treating every citizen with
compassion, courtesy, professionalism, and respect."?
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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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