NYC NOW - April 24, 2023: Midday News

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Two NYPD officers face a disciplinary hearing Monday amid dropped misconduct charges, sparking concerns among advocates, New York City continues its open streets program, and in sports news, the Rangers play the Devils tonight at the Garden after taking a 2-1 playoff series lead. And finally, after last week’s announcement that New York City PBA President Patrick Lynch will step down after 24 years, WNYC’s Michael Hill sits with public safety reporter Matt Katz to discuss the tight race to replace Lynch. Among the contenders is Corey Grable, who could make history as the first black union chief in the nation’s largest police union if elected.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Monday, April 24th. Here's the midday news from Lance Lucky. Two police officers are facing a disciplinary hearing today after NYPD brass quietly dropped one of several misconduct charges against them. Advocates say it's part of an alarming pattern. Michael Sizzitsky is an assistant policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The NYPB's default line is trust us to police ourselves. And that has really severe implications for any New Yorker who is looking for some measure of accountability when they are mistreated by an officer. In 2019, the two officers entered the home of a Bronx man named Kawasaki Treywick while he was having an apparent mental health crisis. One of the officers shot and killed Treywick less than two minutes later. New York City's Open Streets program will continue. to grow this year. The Department of Transportation kicked off its annual effort to limit cars on city streets over the weekend and announced it would bring open streets to 25 new places in the five boroughs. The new locations include Brownsville and Bushwick in Brooklyn, South Jamaica in Queens,

and Soundview in the Bronx. The city says more open streets will be launched July 1st. The DOT also plans to redesign the open streets programs at nine spots across the city, including Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn and West 22nd Street in Manhattan. In the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Hudson River series continues tonight. At Madison Square Garden, the Rangers now lead the Devils two games to one after the devil stunned the blue shirt Garden Faithful with a two-to-one overtime win Saturday. The puck drops in game four tonight at seven. The face of the largest police union in America will change this summer.

New York City PBA president, Patrick Lynch. An incendiary leader who has defended police for the last 24 years said last week he's stepping down. That means a new leader for the union and maybe for the first time in its history, the president of the PBA will be a black officer. Joining us now to tell us who might replace Lynch is WNYC's Matt Katz. Matt come morning. Hi there, Michael. You reported last week that Lynch is not seeking re-election to his post and this came as a surprise to a lot of people.

What drove his decision? Yeah, the PBA Joe. just inked a deal with the city on a long-awaited new contract. It's worth $5.5 billion and retroactively awards pay raises of more than 28% from 2017 to 2025. So Lynch said he wanted to see this contract signed, this good deal for cops, done, and now he's ready to pass the reins. And that's significant. Lynch was a ubiquitous figure in tabloids on TV through the years, defending cops against accusations of police brutality. He went after politicians who endorsed criminal justice reform policies.

Most notoriously, he said that former mayor Bill de Blasio had blood on his hands after two officers were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2014. And then here he was five years later after the police commissioner fired Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who put Eric Garner in a chokehold on Staten Island, leading to his death. The leadership of this city and this police department is absolutely afraid of the criminal advocates and based this decision not on the facts, but based this decision on the politics. This was actually the first time I saw Lynch in person. This is him reacting to Daniel Pentaleo's firing. I was covering that press conference, and I remember thinking he was

among the most animated public figures I had ever reported on. And that's why it's so hard to imagine the police union or the NYPD in general without Lynch as this advocate for a certain brand of policing. Who's going to replace it, man? Well, there's an election in June to figure that out, and there are two major candidates at the moment. The current PBA treasurer, Patrick Hendry, is Lynch's handpicked successor. Lynch actually endorsed Hendry at a PBA meeting a couple of weeks ago. I reached out to Hendry in a number of ways since then, but he didn't agree to an interview. He's instead been going around the precincts talking to officers at their daily roll calls. Here's a video he posted on Facebook of him at the 103.

precinct in Queens. I will be your voice when you don't have one. When you pick up the paper the morning, when you read online, you're going to see me in it fighting for you. So from that, you can hear that it sounds like if elected, he's going to use the media bully pulpit, much like lynched it. And who's the other candidate? Corey Grable is currently the PBA Financial Secretary for Transit, and if elected, he would

be the first black president in PBA history and the only black president. of the NYPD's five unions. Lynch and his handpick successor, Hendry, are both white Irish Americans, but the NYPD is now mostly non-white, so Grable's candidacy alone shows a changing NYPD. And experts who study the influence of unions say the optics of having a black president to the public might make a difference in the perception of alleged police misconduct when it involves black victims. For his part, though, Grable said race has nothing to do with this election.

He said he wants to make the city's disciplinary process more fair to officers. And he told me he was inspired to get involved in the union after shooting his weapon and firing and hitting an alleged perpetrator and a bystander not fatally back in the mid-90s while trying to stop a knife attack. His union rep at the time helped him through that experience. And that's what made Grable want to get involved in union work. Matt, does Grable present himself as a different stylistically from Lynch? Yeah, he's much more soft-spoken by nature, and that was evident, as you can hear, in our interview. When you start building the relationships and building up trust, you know, that's how you get thing done. You know, sometimes screaming, and, you know, there might be a need for that at some point, but you can't scream all the time.

And then more importantly, in recent years, that hasn't worked. Matt, would you describe the power that police unions still have? And why it might matter to an average person out there who is running this union? I spoke to George Camacho from the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School about this. He used to work as an advisor for the city on criminal justice issues. And he says, cops feel they're under such scrutiny. So they oppose any progressive change to law enforcement, reflexively just believing that their power is being threatened.

And one of the ways that they push back on this is by using the media. particularly local TV news, the local papers, to yell about any threat to their power. But maybe that could change just a little bit, Camacho said. I think it's very conceivable to see a different kind of PBA under a different kind of leadership, although one that still is going to be expected to be a dogged advocate of its union membership. So whether a different kind of dogged advocate can continue to have such a significant role in swaying public opinion on issues related to law enforcement, I think that's really what's at stake in this election. And that's what we'll be continuing to follow.

We'll be paying attention to it too. Matt Katz is a public safety reporter at WNYC. Matt, thank you. Thanks a lot, Michael. That was Michael Hill, and this is NYC now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. More this evening.