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Activists seek prosecutor for NYPD brutality cases

BY KEITH HERBERT | keith.herbert@newsday.com

6:30 PM EDT, May 7, 2008

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A 10-point plan for reform in the New York Police Department after the 1999 fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo had been whittled down considerably by the time demonstrators protesting the Sean Bell case took to the streets Wednesday.

Now, leaders of efforts to change government policies regarding police misconduct are lining up behind a single reform: appointment of a permanent statewide prosecutor to investigate police brutality cases.

A special prosecutor, civil rights activists said, would do much to ensure that deaths such as Diallo's and Bell's are far fewer.

The time, they said, is propitious for change.

"The one thing that's different now ... is that David A. Paterson is governor of New York," said Norm Siegel, former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who sat on a blue-ribbon panel appointed by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani to examine police-community relations in 1997 after the police torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a Brooklyn station house.

Paterson was among hundreds of demonstrators arrested in 1999 outside police headquarters in lower Manhattan in days of protests led by the Rev. Al Sharpton after Diallo, who was unarmed, died in a hail of 41 police shots in the vestibule of his Soundview, Bronx, apartment building. After a trial in Albany, four officers were acquitted of charges of murder and reckless endangerment.

"If we cannot achieve the systemic change now or in the next year, we'll probably never be able to do it," Siegel said.

State Sen. Eric Adams (D-Brooklyn) said he plans to introduce legislation to establish a special prosecutor who would investigate allegations of police misconduct and instances in which a citizen is seriously injured or killed by police.

The governor's office is evaluating the proposal, a spokesman said.

For Michael Hardy, the lawyer representing Bell's friend Trent Benefield, who was wounded in the barrage of 50 bullets when Bell was killed, said any reforms to counter police actions historically run into a robust roadblock -- the police union.

"They have a very powerful union that represents them," said Hardy, who also represents Sharpton's Harlem-based organization, the National Action Network. "Many legislators are careful. They don't want to upset them. It probably explains why you've had incident after incident with little legislative change."

Nonsense, said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association, to which the three detectives charged in the Bell case belong.

"That's an insult to the lawmakers up in Albany," Palladino said. "What I think the lawmakers take a look at is: Is there a problem that needs to be corrected by legislation? New York City police officers are the most restrained in the country. The problem here exists with Al Sharpton and others."

Sharpton and others refuse to accept that the shooting of Bell and his two friends, while tragic, wasn't criminal, Palladino said.

"My heart goes out to the Bell family, but you can't twist this into something it's not," Palladino said.

With so much attention on the acquittals of the detectives, Palladino said he's making certain that the police side of the story gets heard. He was scheduled Wednesday to travel to Washington, D.C., to meet with Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Conyers visited New York after the detectives' acquittals on April 25, going to the scene of the shooting in Jamaica, Queens, and meeting with Bell's family.

Sharpton has asked Conyers to hold hearings on police shootings in New York City. Palladino said he planned to meet with other members of the Judiciary Committee as well.