The ‘Pantaleo effect’ proves the city can’t afford to soften the NYPD
By Miranda Devine
New York Post
July 28, 2019
We were still reeling at the spectacle of meek NYPD cops being doused with water all over town when Officer Daniel Pantaleo’s home on Staten Island was besieged by protesters Saturday night.
“He needs to feel fear wherever he goes!” chanted the small group. “We will find you, Pantaleo! No justice, no peace.”
Five years after bootleg cigarette seller Eric Garner died during a so-called “chokehold arrest” on Staten Island, Pantaleo has had no justice and no peace.
He was a good cop doing his job. But his abandonment by craven politicians and top brass has become the unspoken subtext of every police interaction in this city ever since.
His childhood friend Joseph Imperatrice, founder of Blue Lives Matter, is one who calls it the “Pantaleo effect.”
“Police officers cannot be afraid to do their job,” he said. “They have to understand the officers around them and the higher brass will have their back.”
Garner’s death was a tragedy, but even the medical examiner who ruled it a homicide found his health problems contributed. Garner was 6-foot-3 and obese, at 395 pounds. He had an enlarged heart and chronic asthma. The stress of struggling with cops triggered a fatal asthma attack.
Pantaleo is 6 feet and 220 pounds. He had been ordered to arrest Garner. When a man far bigger than him resisted, what was he meant to do, walk away?
Well, walk away is exactly what police are doing now.
And not once has anyone in authority understood how their failure to defend Pantaleo has damaged police morale.
Instead they pander to anti-police bullies who use the poor grieving Garner family as pawns.
The extraordinary passivity last week of those officers in Brooklyn and Harlem as jeering punks soaked them with water has been a long time brewing.
It began with race-baiting former President Barack Obama’s misguided criticism of police in Cambridge, Mass., over the 2009 arrest of his friend Henry Gates. It came to a head in 2014 with the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie told about Michael Brown after he was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Mo., just three weeks after Garner’s death.
Along the way, Obama gave succor to anti-police activists. The inevitable result of hostility to law enforcement was the assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, just weeks after a grand jury cleared Pantaleo.
Vilified by president wannabe Bill de Blasio and hung out to dry by Commissioner James O’Neill, Pantaleo has seen his actions on that summer’s day in 2014 after Garner resisted arrest scrutinized in every available jurisdiction.
A Staten Island grand jury found he had no case to answer.
The US Justice Department found he had no case to answer.
Now we await the result of a police disciplinary trial and the verdict of Commissioner O’Neill.
For police-haters, Pantaleo is a symbol of the “broken windows” tough-on-crime policing which so successfully cleaned up the city 25 years ago, and which de Blasio is doing his best to unwind while boasting of the low crime rates that are entirely its legacy.
Destroy Pantaleo and you destroy broken windows and, with it, the morale of the NYPD.
You can see how low morale has sunk in the resigned reaction of cops to egregious acts of disrespect, whether being doused by water in Harlem and Brooklyn, having buckets thrown at their heads, or just a foul-mouthed punk on the subway telling them to “suck my d–k”.
“Officers are not supported,” Ed Mullins, head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said on Friday.
“That’s the sentiment of the rank and file. They’re afraid to get involved because they know they don’t have the backing of the commissioner or the mayor.”
He is furious that de Blasio used the national platform of the first Democratic presidential debate last month to repeat the racist slur that his biracial son, Dante, wasn’t safe around cops because he was a “child of color.”
Nothing has changed since thousands of officers turned their backs on de Blasio at the funeral five years ago of assassinated cop Liu.
Mullins warns that it was the soft-touch policing of the 1970s that led to the crime explosion of the 1980s, and says water dousing incidents are just “the appetizer” to lawlessness to come.
“It won’t be on [de Blasio’s] watch,” he says. “It’s going to be the next mayor and the next commissioner.”
Already, he says, “crooks are getting emboldened . . . Perps know they’re not being searched for firearms. When you talk to the people of the city, they don’t feel safe. They see homelessness, people urinating in the street, turnstile jumping . . . We’re not enforcing crimes anymore.”
“The cops are confused as to what you want them to do,” Mullins says. “The backing off of law enforcement is beginning to erode the city.”
President Trump’s intervention this week, when he voiced support for the embattled cops of his hometown, blasting the water tossing as a “total disgrace,” meant the world, says Mullins.
But the only way to restore the morale of New York’s emasculated police force is for O’Neill to come out from behind his desk and defend Pantaleo.
He might owe his job to de Blasio but he doesn’t owe him his soul.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Way to go. You tell ’em, Miranda, you’re divine!
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