Officer Philip Case was arrested for menacing in 2019 after he allegedly pulled a gun on Kevin Skervin in a road rage incident. But instead of termination, the department docked Sanchez’s pay 26
days, took away 30 vacation days, and placed him on dismissal probation
for a year where he would be fired if he broke any other department
rules.
He’s currently back to full duty with his department firearm, working out of the transit bureau’s anti-terrorism unit.
“I wish I could be able to talk about this and answer your questions
but I can not,” Sanchez told The Post when asked about the arrest.
The cop who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, Officer Philip
Case, was also allowed to keep his job even after being found guilty of
the conduct internally, as well.
Case, then 49, was busted for menacing in Sept. 2019 after he allegedly pulled a gun on Kevin Skervin
in a Queens road-rage incident and threatened to “shoot and murder” him
while pointing his weapon at him and another passenger, Tomas Ortega
Martinez. At the time, Case had been working a side gig for the US Open
tournament without the department’s permission.
About a month-and-a-half after the incident, the NYPD found that Case
had displayed a gun during an argument and was guilty of menacing,
harassment, the wrongful threat of force, and off-duty employment
without permission. They docked his vacation days and put him on
dismissal probation.
In court, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, a violation and not a crime, which allowed the case to be sealed.
These days, Case is back to full duty with his department firearm at
the 79th precinct in Brooklyn and denies that he pulled out his gun and
threatened Skervin and Martinez. He is currently embroiled in a civil lawsuit brought by the two men.
Case pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and was allowed to keep his job.
“We had a little road dispute. I cursed him out, he cursed me out. He
said I had a firearm. My gun was at home,” Case told The Post Tuesday,
adding he’s grateful to be back to full duty.
“There was no proof of what I did. They just went along with it.”
Numerous other cases show a similar trend:
Police Officer Jeffrey Augustin was busted for allegedly choking
his wife and threatening to kill her after getting into a fight over
money in Nov. 2017 on Staten Island. The case is sealed in the court
system but nearly two years later, an internal administrative review
found he had assaulted someone twice and made a harassing phone call. He
was suspended without pay for 13 days, ordered to undergo counseling,
and placed on dismissal probation for a year. These days, he’s back to
full duty, working out of the 84th precinct. He didn’t return a request
for comment. Police Officer Victor Cruz was busted for assault
for allegedly attacking his girlfriend in April 2018 in Manhattan. The
case is sealed but internally, he was found guilty of assault and he was
ordered to undergo counseling, placed on dismissal probation, and was
docked a number of suspension days. These days, he’s back to full duty,
working out of the 44th precinct. He didn’t return a request for
comment. Police Officer Anthony Amirally was arrested in Dec. 2018 in The Bronx for allegedly choking his mom
during a fight at the family’s home. The charges were later dropped
after the mom refused to cooperate and the case is now sealed but an
internal administrative review found he was guilty of assault. He was
ordered to undergo counseling, placed on dismissal probation for 12
months, and docked 32 suspension days. These days, he’s back to full
duty, working out of the 28th precinct. He didn’t return a request for
comment. Det. Aliskender Raji was arrested for assault and criminal mischief
in Feb. 2020 in Queens for allegedly kicking his wife and smashing her
cell phone. The case was sealed but an internal administrative review
found he was guilty of assault and criminal mischief and he was ordered
to undergo counseling, placed on dismissal probation for 12 months, and
docked 14 suspension days. These days, he’s back to full duty, working
out of the department’s criminal intelligence section. He didn’t return a
request for comment. Police Officer Chon Huang was arrested
for assault in May 2019 in Brooklyn for allegedly punching an e-bike
driver who almost clipped his daughter. The case is sealed but
internally, he was found guilty of assault and he was placed on
dismissal probation and docked 30 suspension days. These days, he’s back
to full duty, working out of Brooklyn’s 94th precinct. He declined to
comment. Low conviction rates, sweetheart deals
Of the 908 total arrests involving city employees tracked by The Post
between 2017 and 2021, just 21 are still pending in the court system.
There is little information available about the cases that were
adjudicated because the vast majority of them are sealed.
Cases are sealed when the charge is dismissed, the district attorney
declined to prosecute or the defendant pled to a violation such as
disorderly conduct, which is not a crime. It can also happen when the
case ends with an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal (ACD), where
the judge orders that the charges be wiped as long as the accused stays
out of trouble for a certain time period, usually six to 12 months.
The bulk of the cases against NYPD staff involved violent and
domestic violence-related offenses that are grounds for automatic
termination, including assault, harassment, aggravated harassment,
menacing, and strangulation.
Under New York state law, any officer that is criminally convicted of
a felony, or a misdemeanor that violates their oath of office – such as
perjury, official misconduct, bribery, menacing, stalking, assault, or
aggravated harassment – is automatically terminated but still may be
entitled to their pension.
Any law enforcement officer accused of most domestic violence
offenses automatically faces termination because, under federal law,
anyone convicted of such a crime can’t have a firearm, which would
preclude them from police work.
However, the general likelihood that NYPD employees will see a
conviction on such offenses is slim. Between 2017 and 2021, cases
involving NYPD employees led to convictions about 26% of the time,
primarily for DWI offenses — compared to 38% of the general public who
were prosecuted in the five boroughs during that same time period.
Other city workers, like teachers and firefighters, were also more
likely than their NYPD counterparts to see convictions in the court
system, with an average of 31% of cases resulting in convictions.
The NYPD’s disciplinary matrix states cops could still be penalized
internally or fired after an arrest, regardless of what happens in
court.
But a 2016 study on police crime
published by Stinson found cops are six times more likely to lose their
jobs in violence-related cases if the officer is ultimately convicted
in criminal court.
“Prosecutors, to be able to do their daily bread and butter work,
they rely on police officers showing up in court and cooperating with
them on prosecutions, the run of the mill criminal cases, just the daily
grind of prosecutors,” said Stinson, who is considered the leading
expert on police crime.
“I think that in some instances, prosecutors are very reluctant in
any way to piss off the police … so in cases that are not getting a lot
of media attention especially, I think it’s highly likely that police
officers are more likely to get favorable outcomes than other defendants
would in their criminal cases.”
‘I had the evidence … it was still not enough ‘
When Melissa’s boyfriend NYPD Police Officer Christopher Valencia strangled her, held her prisoner, busted her lip , and bit her so hard on her leg, it drew blood, she was confident the case would succeed in court.
After all, she was a police officer herself and she believed she had
the evidence necessary to bring a case – photos of her injuries, text
messages of him admitting to the crimes, and witnesses who saw parts of
the attacks.
“As a cop I knew I had the evidence that I would need and apparently
it was still not enough,” Melissa, now 27, told The Post in a recent
interview, asking that she only be identified by her first name.
The Post reviewed photos of Melissa’s injuries and text messages from Valencia admitting to the attacks.
Officer Christopher Valencia strangled his girlfriend, held her hostage, and bit her. When Melissa reported the attacks in Jan. 2021, which happened on two
separate occasions in Queens and in Suffolk County, Long Island about a
year prior, prosecutors at the Queens County District Attorney’s Public
Corruption Bureau were reluctant to try the case, she alleged.
The assistant district attorney assigned to the case asked her, “Well
did you ask for that?” and told her that to an outsider, her injuries
“just look like rough sex,” Melissa alleged.
“She’s like, ‘You’re a cop you get it’ and I’m like, ‘I know I’m a
cop but no I didn’t ask for him to do this to me,’” Melissa recalled.
“They said that if he got charged with [a domestic violence-related
offense] he would lose his job. I said ‘he shouldn’t have the job’ …
she’s like, ‘Well I can’t just be OK with that because he’s a cop.’
“Every time I left there I was just hysterical crying. They made me
feel like I was doing the wrong thing and I felt they were just trying
to protect him because he was a police officer … they didn’t want more
poor attention on the police department.”
Melissa was prepared to go to trial and had numerous trial prep dates
with prosecutors — but soon learned they decided to offer Valencia an
ACD after he completed 26 domestic violence/anger management treatment
sessions, which would seal the case after a year.
She told them she didn’t agree with the decision and still wanted to move ahead with trial, but was told the matter was settled.
“Everything was there, I had all the evidence, I knew what he did
wasn’t right and I knew I was prepared and for them to just make a deal …
I just felt so defeated,” said Melissa, who has since left the NYPD and
moved to North Carolina.
“It scares me that one day he’ll have a gun again and will be interacting with the public.”
Valencia is still employed by the NYPD on modified duty nearly two
years after his arrest. It is unclear if there are any internal
disciplinary proceedings against Valencia currently underway. He didn’t
return a request for comment.
In response, a spokesperson for the Queens County District Attorney’s Office said “the disposition was appropriate.”
“With these facts and two parties who were not police officers, the
outcome would have been exactly the same,” the spokesperson said. “When
the 2019 crime was reported by the complainant [a year and a half]
later, the defendant was charged in accordance with the facts of the
case.”
The office said the injuries — including bitemarks left permanently
etched on Melissa’s legs — didn’t meet the standard for felony assault.
Beyond the 16 officers found guilty internally yet still employed,
Valencia is one of 31 cops identified by The Post who’ve kept their jobs
after they were accused of fireable offenses. But he, like the others,
saw favorable outcomes in the court system. Any internal disciplinary
measures against them are either unclear or underway.
Valencia is still employed by the NYPD on modified duty nearly two years after his arrest.
Among them is also Police Officer Ernie Moran, who faced automatic termination after he was charged with aggravated harassment and stalking
on July 8, 2020, for sending his ex-girlfriend multiple text messages
stating “he was outside her house” and “had his firearm and would kill
whoever she was with.”
Moran, then 34, had been dumped three months prior but continued to
call his ex “multiple times on a daily basis,” showed up at her house
after she asked him to stop contacting her and once got into a fight
with a man he thought she was dating.
The victim told cops she was afraid for her safety because Moran had
allegedly physically abused her throughout their relationship.
In Dec. 2021, Moran pleaded to fourth-degree criminal mischief, which
isn’t an oath-violating offense, and was sentenced to $22,000 in
restitution, court records show.
Nearly a year after his conviction, he is still employed with the
NYPD, working on modified duty out of a Bronx courthouse and collecting
tens of thousands of dollars in overtime and extra compensation.
It is unclear if there are any internal disciplinary proceedings
against Moran currently underway. He didn’t return a request for
comment.
Officer Ernie Moran was charged with aggravated harassment and stalking on July 8, 2020.
“Officers who are convicted, even officers convicted of misdemeanors,
I would argue shouldn’t be police officers,” said Stinson.
“They violated the public trust and we have to work hard to maintain
police accountability but also police legitimacy and if the citizenry
doesn’t view their police officers as legitimate because of officers who
were being convicted of misdemeanors are still working it could lead to
erosion in the trust in police.”
Convoluted, nepotistic disciplinary system
In the case of Smith, the disposition of her 2011 arrest is unclear
and the 2017 bust on assault charges is sealed. Following her June 2020
arrest for drunk driving, she pleaded guilty to driving while impaired,
and her license was suspended for 90 days.
She was disciplined internally over her 2017 bust for assault where
she was found guilty of an off-duty physical altercation and placed on
dismissal probation for 12 months, ordered to undergo breath testing,
and docked 30 days pay.
Even though Smith’s third arrest was more than two years ago, she was
only suspended without pay at the beginning of November, and is now
“currently separating from the department,” an NYPD spokesperson claimed
this week.
Smith’s department trial wrapped up in July, the spokesperson said.
She’d been on modified duty and collecting her paycheck as recently as
November 1.
For years, the NYPD’s disciplinary process was criticized for a myriad of reasons and shrouded in secrecy, prompting an overhaul of the system in Jan. 2021 that sought to improve “fairness and efficacy” and reduce inconsistencies and oversights.
Dr. Keith Taylor, a former NYPD Internal Affairs supervisor who is
now an Adjunct Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice, said the department had “historic issues with certain groups
getting disparate treatment” over others when it came to discipline and
noted that nepotism had long played a role.
In one case identified by The Post, Lt. Marykate Mullan was assigned
to the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Squad and had been with the department
for nearly 20 years when she was arrested for drunk driving after getting into an accident in March 2017 in Queens.
She pleaded guilty to driving while impaired and an internal
administrative review also found she had driven drunk. She was placed on
dismissal probation, ordered to undergo counseling, docked 20 vacation
days, and suspended without pay for 23 days, among other penalties.
Despite the conviction, Mullan was not demoted or terminated and
instead, was given a discretionary “special assignment” promotion about
three years later.
The promotion came with a salary increase, which bumped her total pay
with overtime from $159,676 in 2019 to $218,362 in 2020 and $226,050 in
2021 until she left the department the following year. She declined to
comment.
Det. Michael Gries was busted for drunken driving in Brooklyn in Oct.
2017, about a year and a half after he’d been promoted to the rank, and
was convicted of the offense and later found guilty of it internally as
well.
He was placed on dismissal probation, ordered to undergo counseling, and docked 10 vacation days, among other penalties.
Despite the conviction, he was never demoted from his role and
instead, was promoted to a second-grade detective sometime between 2021
and 2022. He didn’t return a request for comment.
“There are certain groups that may have more connections … they have
people that they can reach out to both in the executive level as well as
the political class who can help them with these [cases],” explained
Taylor.
“Some other groups may not have access to that kind of power to intercede in the disciplinary process.”
In comparison, Det. John Glynn was demoted after his drunk driving bust in 2019.
Glynn, whose Jan. 2019 case is sealed in the court system, was
demoted to the rank of police officer in Feb. 2020 after a year and a
half as a detective. He didn’t comment when reached by The Post.
“He may not have had any friends in high places,” Taylor said.
While each officer arrest is handled on a case-by-case basis
internally, Taylor said such instances of disparate treatment are one of
the reasons why the disciplinary matrix was reformed in 2021.
The results of the reform are a convoluted labyrinth of “presumptive
penalties,” “mitigated” and “aggravated” penalties for a wide range of
offenses, both criminal and internal, that almost always come down to
the police commissioner’s discretion.
Officers who deny the charges against them can contest them in an
internal trial but the process can take years and in the meantime,
they’re allowed to remain on modified duty and collect their full
salaries.
Despite the reforms, connections within the police department still appear to prevail.
Det. Nalik Zeigler, whose parents were two NYPD bigwigs – former NYPD
Deputy Commissioner of Equal Employment Opportunity Neldra Zeigler and
former Chief of Community Affairs Douglas Zeigler – was busted for drunk
driving and allegedly crashing into parked cars in Oct. 2018 in
Manhattan just weeks after his dubious promotion to second-grade
detective seven years into his NYPD career.
He pleaded guilty to drunk driving internally and was placed on
dismissal probation, among other penalties — but it took three years for
the case to move through the courts.
By then, the disciplinary reforms were already in place and under the
current standards, drunk driving with aggravating factors, such as
crashing into cars and causing property damage, could lead to
termination, or at the very least a demotion.
Instead, more than a year after Zeigler was found guilty in criminal
court of drunk driving, he is yet to be demoted or face any other known
internal discipline and remains at the department’s cushy Intelligence
Bureau.
He didn’t comment when reached by The Post.
Rotten to the core To understand why NYPD employees are more likely to be arrested than
their fellow city workers, Dr. Thomas Coghlan said the problem lies
within the department internally.
The clinical psychologist, who is a retired NYPD detective and a
therapist for members of law enforcement, first responders and their
families, pointed to the high rate of civilian arrests within the
department as evidence of a larger, internal breakdown.
“The concern is with the department as an entity, as an employer,
right? Why does this employer represent this disproportionate piece of
the data?” said Coghlan, who is also an adjunct professor of forensic
psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“The department is a toxic workplace, it’s a toxic cesspool that when you sit in it long enough, you become toxic.”
Coghlan said the internal stress that comes from working for the
NYPD, both in civilian and uniformed roles, leads to a “whirlwind of
maladaptive coping mechanisms” and concerning behaviors that “leads us
down the road to arrests.”
A lot of that stress comes from the issues highlighted in a Post exposé
about the reasons why officers are leaving the department in droves,
including forced overtime, poor work-life balance, and the NYPD’s
history of nepotism.
“Punitive paradigms, draconian policies, and autocratic hierarchical
system, nepotistic behavior … we know that the agency created stressors,
the organizational stressors, that is where the stress in police work
really exists,” said Coghlan, citing research.
When you couple organizational stressors with the general stress and
trauma of being a police officer, occupational stressors like mandated
overtime and canceled days off, and add in family and social stressors,
“it is like gasoline on a fire,” said Coghlan.
“You become physically and mentally exhausted, you develop a
heightened sense of pessimism and cynicism, low sense of fulfillment,
low sense of efficacy within your job roles,” explained Coghlan.
“Then that behavior comes home with you, your mood decompensates, you
develop a more apathetic mood to things, you develop a more indifferent
mood and that permeates throughout your personality … Operating in that
type of structure long enough causes a tremendous amount of discord in
people’s personal lives.”
While getting arrested can have a significant impact on an officer’s
credibility, at the end of the day, cops are “human beings” with “human
behaviors” who are “absolutely” capable of rehabilitation, argued
Rivera.
“There’s definitely a road to redemption,” said Rivera.
“It might be a humbling experience for the individual, you can
absolutely rehabilitate an officer. What becomes problematic is if the
officer has no credibility or their truthfulness has been brought to
question. That you can’t come back from.”
Officer Samantha Medina was busted for DWI and leaving the scene of an accident that caused injuries in 2018.
In response to The Post’s investigation, an NYPD spokesperson said
employee arrests are a “severe” concern to the department because “our
members are expected to exhibit higher standards than the general public
given their profession and the duties they perform each day.”
“When a member is arrested, not only do they face the potential
consequences of the criminal justice system, but they are subject to
additional, and fervent, scrutiny from our internal investigations and
by our disciplinary system, where appropriate,” the spokesperson said.
“Most of the events referenced [by The Post] occurred before the
institution of the NYPD Disciplinary Matrix, which took effect in
January 2021, and was the product of a collaborative effort with the
CCRB and other interested stakeholders to ensure consistency in our
process and those appropriate penalties are meted out – including
termination, when necessary. The Matrix is not a static document and can
be amended to address concerns and patterns seen within the
disciplinary process.”
New York's Finest?
ReplyDeleteCops are not the only subgroup that have this "benefit" coming to them. They are the most dangerous to society though. (Teachers come to mind. NY has dozens of school teachers that are still on full pay that are not allowed to come near a student.)
ReplyDeleteWhen checking off the ethnic and gender boxes and meeting quotas is more important than actual proficiency and moral character...this is what you get.
ReplyDelete