Old Grievances Drive An Unearned Honor

Old Grievances Drive An Unearned Honor

For Detectives Endowment Association President Mike Palladino, the pending City Council battle over naming a street in memory of Sean Bell comes close to retrying the case of his three members who were charged in the fatal shooting 2½ years ago.

"It's alienating the police force," he said in an April 29 interview about the measure that is expected to go before a Council committee within the next couple of weeks. "Bell got killed during the commission of a crime. He was intoxicated, he got behind the wheel, he tried to use the car as a battering ram."

Queens City Councilman Leroy Comrie, who is sponsoring the bill, countered the next day, "That's only Mike ratcheting up the rhetoric. This is not an indictment of the Police Department but an acknowledgment of a tragedy." He pointed out that Community Board 12, which last month approved a resolution to rename several blocks of Liverpool St.—the block where the fatal confrontation took place—Sean Bell Way was "the same community board that named streets for two police officers that fell in the line of duty."

PERSPECTIVES AT ODDS: Detectives Endowment Association President Mike Palladino contends that Sean Bell should not be honored by having a street re-named in his memory because he did nothing in life of distinction prior to being shot by police in a confrontation he precipitated. City Councilman Leroy Comrie disagrees, saying that the bill he is sponsoring would commemorate 'a historic incident…an accident that shouldn't have happened.'

Quinn Won't Declare Yet

The lines are being drawn once again, even as some of the players try to keep the volume down. After stories in both the New York Post and Daily News April 24 quoted unnamed sources as saying that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn supports the bill—making its passage likely—Ms. Quinn's chief spokesman, Jamie McShane, parried a request for an interview last week by saying it was "premature" for her to comment.

Mr. Palladino said that a week prior to the tabloid stories, he had gotten a call from the Speaker's Chief of Staff, Ramon Martinez, in which he was informed that she would back the bill. For the moment, the one certainty is that the Council Speaker is prepared to let the measure wend its way through the process without seeking to delete it, the way she did by uncoupling a bill re-naming a Bedford Stuyvesant street for the racial firebrand Sonny Carson a couple of years ago, which ultimately ensured that it did not become law.

Detective Palladino suggests that a stronger case could be made on Mr. Carson's behalf than Mr. Bell's, given the late activist's anti-drug efforts in Brooklyn. For anyone who remembers Mr. Carson's incendiary posturing during the Korean boycott in Flatbush and the Crown Heights riots in the early 1990s, that argument is a tough sell, however.

But the DEA leader contends that street re-namings are intended to honor those who made major contributions to society, citing Martin Luther King Jr. and Joe DiMaggio among the most-prominent examples.

The Council has rarely abided by that strict a standard. It has named streets, or portions of them, in memory of entertainers on the one hand, and civic activists and those who died serving their city or country on the other.

In all such cases, Mr. Palladino contended, the common denominator was that the individuals had done something to distinguish themselves. "I fail to see the accomplishments that Bell made during his short life that would warrant the recognition," he said.

Council Member Comrie responded, "What happened was a historic incident. It clearly was a tragedy; it was an accident that shouldn't have happened."

'Drunk and Judgment Impaired'

He emphasized that he wasn't nominating Mr. Bell for sainthood, saying that the actions he took that led to police opening fire on him as he tried to drive away from them occurred "because he was drunk and running from an unknown assailant with a gun. If I was drunk in the same situation, I might not have behaved differently. There is no question that he was drunk and his judgment was impaired."

Frank as that acknowledgment is, it doesn't flesh out the extent to which Mr. Bell's condition created the atmosphere in which Detective Gescard Isnora, who had been working undercover inside the Kalua Cabaret where the Bell bachelor party took place, reasonably concluded that a drive-by shooting might take place unless he interceded.

It was about 4 a.m. the morning of Nov. 25, 2006 when Mr. Bell got into a loud argument with Fabio Coicou, a stranger who stood with a hand in his pocket, leading others from the bachelor party to believe he might be holding a gun. As the dispute escalated, someone in Mr. Bell's party, according to witness testimony, said something about getting a gun of his own, which led Detective Isnora, who normally would have handed off the case to his back-ups so as not to blow his cover, to follow three men as they returned to Mr. Bell's car.

There was no testimony at the trial of the three officers indicted for the fatal shooting to definitively establish whether Mr. Bell knew that Detective Isnora was a cop. But as Mr. Palladino points out, any uncertainty on that score should have been cleared up when, after he "hit Jessie Isnora so hard that the fabric of his pants were embedded in the engine," Mr. Bell's car then banged into an approaching minivan containing the back-up officers.

Yet Mr. Bell drove forward again and Detective Isnora began shooting, touching off the flurry of 50 bullets fired by police officers. There is at least a strong possibility that by the time he took that action, Mr. Bell was fully aware that he was dealing with cops and his desperation stemmed less from fear for his life than the prospect that he would not make his own wedding later that day because he would be behind bars.

'Three Fictions About Case'

Mr. Palladino asserted that Mr. Bell's heavy drinking that night, and the actions he took as a result, are all the more reason he should not be given the honor of a street named in his memory. Mr. Bell's supporters, he said, put forth "three fictions that have surrounded the case from the beginning."

The first, he said, was that the shooting was racially motivated, when in fact three of the five officers who fired their weapons were minorities.

"The second fiction was that the cops were drunk," Mr. Palladino said. "The only one that was intoxicated was Bell. The third fiction—and this is what the prosecution hung its hat on—was that these guys didn't know it was the cops that were coming" when Mr. Bell drove his car into Detective Isnora.

He cited a statement made under cross-examination by Joseph Guzman, one of the two men in the car with Mr. Bell, that when the shooting stopped he declared, "Officer, you just killed us for nothing. There's no gun in this car."

'Knew When They Stopped Shooting'

Councilman Comrie, who did not attend the trial but said he read portions of the transcript, responded that all that statement established was that "afterwards they realized they were cops because they didn't keep on shooting into the car," as they would have if they were street thugs.

During the trial, there was conflicting witness testimony as to whether Detective Isnora had verbally identified himself as a cop, and whether he was wearing his shield so that it could clearly be glimpsed as he approached Mr. Bell's car.

But Mr. Palladino said of the prosecution witnesses against his members, "It was a parade of convicted felons, convicted drug-dealers who came in and took the witness stand, and every one of them got caught in lies and inconsistencies—not only with each other but in their own statements to different investigating bodies compared to what they said on the witness stand. They were not credible witnesses, and their account of the story was contradicted by credible testimony and overwhelming scientific and forensic evidence. There was a thorough and extensive examination by a learned Supreme Court Justice by the name of Arthur Cooperman, and it was decided that the officers' actions were appropriate and justified."

Councilman Comrie responded, "To rehash the issues is not what anyone is seeking to do."

Fears Racially Divisive Battle

Somewhat surprisingly, that sentiment is shared by one of the Council's more-conservative members, Republican Minority Leader James Oddo of Staten Island. Two weeks ago, he told Daily News political columnist Elizabeth Benjamin that while he questioned the appropriateness of naming a street for Mr. Bell, an acrimonious hearing process that might leave Council Members divided along racial lines was "the last thing I want for the City Council." He cited the bitterness that accompanied the battle over renaming the street for Sonny Carson two years ago in explaining those feelings.

The positions of both Council Members suggest they are anxious to put the bitterness lingering from the Bell case behind them quickly rather than letting it infect City Hall once again.

For Mr. Palladino, that is a morecomplicated matter, and for reasons that go beyond his personal feelings and the ordeal his Detectives have already endured as part of the fallout from the shooting. He remains angry about previous Council hearings called shortly after the incident that he characterized as "really anti-police rallies that came at a really sensitive time when the case was being presented to a grand jury."

May Influence Federal Probe

A similar scenario could be unfolding here, he said, noting that the U.S. Justice Department is still considering a request by the Bell family that Federal charges be brought against the acquitted cops for violating Sean Bell's civil rights. The Council hearings on the street re-naming, he said, had the potential to "interfere with these officers' [right to] due process, to persuade the Justice Department to give them a second bite at the apple."

He said that he was convinced that if Speaker Quinn wound up supporting the bill, it would be "based on politics. We would hope she would make an informed decision—which she can only do by reading the transcript—and not based on retaining her speakership."

Councilman Comrie, who as Deputy Majority Leader is the Council's third-ranking official, scoffed at the notion that opposing the bill could cost her the Speaker's job next year. "I don't see where that could be," he said. Her willingness to let the measure go forward, he continued, "shows that she wanted to have a frank discussion about it."

Mr. Palladino maintained that approving the bill would send "a terrible message," and that those who supported it were "disregarding the facts, and more importantly, they're disregarding the criminal justice system."

A Parallel With Cops' Response

I asked him whether a similar message hadn't been sent by cops five years ago after the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Timothy Stansbury Jr. by Housing Police Officer Richard Neri. Officer Neri had been about to go to the roof of a building in the Louis Armstrong Houses in Bedford- Stuyvesant one January night in 2004 when the roof door suddenly opened. Startled by Mr. Stansbury, who had crossed over from a neighboring building to get some CDs to bring to a party, Officer Neri, who had his gun out, said he fired reflexively, killing the young man.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly reacted by stating, "There appears to be no justification for the shooting," and Mayor Bloomberg apologized to the teenager's family. Officer Neri appeared before a Brooklyn grand jury which chose not to indict him, apparently persuaded by the remorse he expressed that there had been no intention to harm Mr. Stansbury.

Not long after that, the cops from Mr. Neri's police service area elected him a Patrolmen's Benevolent Association delegate. It seemed clear that they were acting from a mix of sympathy for him and anger with the Police Commissioner and the Mayor for not standing by him, but it also was a profoundly insensitive gesture toward Mr. Stansbury's family and the community.

Another Case With Dubious Honor

Was that so different, I asked Mr. Palladino from the street re-naming bid, inasmuch as like Mr. Bell, Officer Neri (who lost the delegate's job when he was transferred following his conviction in a departmental trial in December 2006 that resulted in a 30-day suspension and permanent loss of his gun), was being honored on somewhat dubious grounds?

"I see your point," Mr. Palladino said.

When I asked Councilman Comrie about it, he responded, "They made him a PBA delegate?" He shook his head in wonder, but then said, "I understand the PBA wanting to protect their own."

If anything, he added, the DEA's quarrel should be less with the Council than with the Police Department, explaining, "It was poor planning on the P.D.'s part that left these guys running down the street brandishing guns."

But actually, while the cops at the scene did not handle the confrontation with Mr. Bell strictly by the textbook, it was more due to a sudden shift in the dynamic outside Kalua caused by angry words at a time of night when woofing can turn to violence quickly.

'Remember Why They Were There'

"We ask our cops every day to put themselves in harm's way to protect the public," Mr. Palladino said. "The community board that took the vote [on the street re-naming], I wonder if they're thinking about the reason the cops were there that night—to shut down a club the community had complained about."

Mr. Bell is hardly the first man to behave stupidly and irresponsibly on his last night before getting married. It was his bad luck to be doing it at a club notorious enough that the NYPD had an operation there meant to gather evidence to shut it down for good.

But tragic as his death was, nothing he did before that night, and certainly nothing he did on the street outside, warrants conferring upon him this kind of honor. It seems motivated, instead, beyond the pressure from the family and his supporters, by the sporadic but simmering hostilities between part of the minority community in this city and its police force.

"Today, Sean Bell, tomorrow they'll be honoring the three Somali pirates," Mr. Palladino said with exasperation. "It defies logic to reward this kind of criminal behavior. If Sean Bell had lived, he would have been in handcuffs."