What Happened To Non-violent Arrests ?

On Wednesday September 9^th Harvard edu­cat­ed retired ten­nis star James Blake 35 was lean­ing against a mir­rored beam out­side a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, his hands clasped as he wait­ed to be tak­en to a cor­po­rate appear­ance at the United States Open when he was bum-rushed and thrown to the ground by white plain-clothes NYPD offi­cer 38-year-old James Frascatore.
Mister Blake sus­tained bumps and bruis­es from his rough encounter with Frascatore he has been doing the media cir­cuit at their invi­ta­tion, to shed light on what real­ly hap­pened to him .
Since then the NYPD has released video footage of the encounter which showed Frascatore rough-hous­ing a star­tled and com­pli­ant Blake. 
Even more dam­ag­ing for Frascatore and the NYPD is the Department’s own acknowl­edge­ment (1) That the encounter was a Sting oper­a­tion gone bad. The NYPD alleges the sting was aimed at an alleged cred­it card scam­mer who resem­bles James Blake. More impor­tant­ly (2) That James Frascatore has a his­to­ry of abu­sive behav­ior to the pub­lic in the four years since he joined the NYPD from Florida. There is no men­tion whether he had a his­to­ry of abu­sive behav­ior while being a police offi­cer in the State of Florid. What we do know is that there are present­ly two civ­il actions in the Courts against Frascatore since he joined the NYPD.

The New York Times reports that In 2012, a Queens man said, Officer James Frascatore pulled him over for a bro­ken tail­light, opened his car door and punched him three times in the mouth, unpro­voked. The fol­low­ing year, anoth­er Queens res­i­dent claimed, Officer Frascatore punched him in the stom­ach sev­er­al times out­side a bode­ga and called him a racial epi­thet. Both inci­dents involved black men.
The Times report indi­cat­ed that Jamaes Frascatore’s his­to­ry of exces­sive force com­plaints, includ­ing at least three filed against him with the Civilian Complaint Review Board in 2013, revealed a pat­tern of res­i­dents claim­ing they were detained with­out expla­na­tion and mis­treat­ed despite com­ply­ing. It also led some lawyers and res­i­dents to crit­i­cize the Police Department for not pun­ish­ing him before he was involved in anoth­er rough arrest.
The report detailed instance after instance in which Frascatore and his cronies assault­ed and abused cit­i­zens and lied about it in police reports. In one case he report­ed that he was bit­ten on the hand by one man he arrest­ed, yet expert tes­ti­mo­ny revealed the cut on his hand was con­sis­tent with him punch­ing the sus­pect in the mouth as the sus­pect­ed main­tained. Despite all of these alle­ga­tions of abuse and instances of lying Officer James Frascatore was still work­ing the streets and allowed to con­tin­ue the pat­tern of rough abu­sive behavior.

Since this report came to light NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has said race played no part in the treat­ment of James Blake. In the mean­time Frascatore report­ed­ly have final­ly been stripped of his gun and badge. Not sur­pris­ing­ly the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said Mister Blake’s arrest “was made under flu­id cir­cum­stances where the sub­ject might have fled.”in an attempt to jus­ti­fy the use of force. No rea­son­able per­son both­er to take the NYPD PBA seri­ous­ly anymore.

Working the streets of any big city for police offi­cers is no easy task . People are rude, abra­sive, dis­re­spect­ful, and they are vio­lent, yet police offi­cers must find ways to do their job with­out undu­ly abus­ing or caus­ing harm to the very peo­ple they are sworn to protect.
Police offi­cers must always be remind­ed that their core func­tion is (1) “to pro­tect and serve”. And (2) That even in the worse sit­u­a­tions a per­son is inno­cent until proven guilty in a court of law. Even then, with the addi­tion of sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal advances to law enforce­ment and crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions we see that in many instances even some the sys­tem adamant­ly claimed were guilty of heinous crimes have been released from pris­ons, some­times after decades in prison for crimes they did not commit.
With that in mind offi­cers should have some degree of pause even when they are con­vinced they are right about the guilt of an indi­vid­ual. A good cop knows things are not always what they seem.

If one was to attach some degree of cred­i­bil­i­ty to the state­ment of the PBA that the sit­u­a­tion was flu­id and that the sus­pect they were actu­al­ly pro­fil­ing could have escaped, one would have to be pre­pared to dis­pense with real­i­ty. No sus­pect being the sub­ject of a sting oper­a­tion in New York City is going to escape, so lets dis­pense with that bull. 
Which brings us to this real­i­ty. The Police claim the sus­pect of their inves­ti­ga­tions was involved in a cred­it card fraud essen­tial­ly a white col­lar crime.
What’s wrong with walk­ing up to a sus­pect and sim­ply iden­ti­fy­ing one’s self as police offi­cers and if war­rant­ed telling the sus­pect he/​she is under arrest?
Why does every arrest have to be about throw­ing peo­ple to the ground with groups of cops strad­dling and kneel­ing into an on the suspect?
What’s that about?
James Blake was tak­en down by a sin­gle offi­cer . If the Police are to be believed when they say the sus­pect they were inves­ti­gat­ing might have fled, they would cer­tain­ly not have had a sin­gle offi­cer doing the take-down and even­tu­al arrest. It is time that the NYPD owns when it is wrong and stop dis­re­spect­ing the cit­i­zens they are sworn to pro­tect and serve. People are pre­pared to give police the ben­e­fit of the doubt because offi­cers are human like the rest of us. Lying and obfus­cat­ing cre­ates more enmi­ty and anger , it’s okay to be wrong, some­thing the PBA seem inca­pable of understanding.

If I am lean­ing on a build­ing and the police comes up and arrest me by mis­take then releas­es me once they fig­ure I was not the per­son they were look­ing for, as long as they did not abuse me or was dis­re­spect­ful to me I’m good. If I get thrown to the ground, sus­tain bumps and bruis­es and is ver­bal­ly abused in the process, of course I want penance from the offender/​s.
Commissioner Bratton’s insis­tence that their ini­tial sus­pect bore strik­ing resem­blance to James Blake and as such race played no role in the inci­dent may res­onate with police apol­o­gists and racism-deniers, it how­ev­er miss­es anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to rec­og­nize and apply fix­es to a sim­mer­ing problem.
It is not out­side the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ties to imag­ine that if James Blake was a white 35-year-old male just stand­ing around he would not be bum-rushed, tack­led and thrown to the ground. 
Commissioner Bratton and mil­lions of racism deniers do them­selves and the nation a dis­ser­vice when they fail to rec­og­nize or admit that there is a built in dis­re­spect when some in law enforce­ment come in con­tact with black and brown cit­i­zens. The longer he and oth­ers con­tin­ue this cha­rade the longer it con­tin­ues, the more like­ly it is that inno­cent peo­ple con­tin­ue to be hurt by police.