Criticism of politicians is a fundamental right which is supposed to be protected by the First Amendment. Political arrests should not be tolerated in New York City - or hushed up in quiet settlement payoffs by New York City's Corporation Counsel. There must be actual accountability for these First Amendment violations.
Monetary damages are an insufficient remedy when police violate the First Amendment by investigating, and arresting, citizens who dare to "annoy" politicians on Staten Island.
Real justice would include oversight hearings by the City Council's Public Safety Committee, discipline of offending police officers, and investigations by New York's Attorney General and the Justice Department's Civil Rights division.
Civil damages against a city with deep pockets, even in a fiscal crisis, will do little to protect citizens from a police department which seemingly is intent on using its arrest powers to shield politicians from public criticism.
Jim Dwyer's story, which appears below, should enrage, and worry, anyone who has ever "annoyed" a politician as part of political activism. If this abuse of police power can happen in Staten Island, surely it can happen to activists in elsewhere in New York City - as it did when the NYPD investigated and infiltrated many groups in advance of the Republican National Convention in 2004 and illegally arrested 1,800 demonstrators/bystanders while President Bush and Mayor Bloomberg were inside Madison Square Garden.
Scott
One evening last August, as Edward Kerry Sullivan stood outside his apartment building on Staten Island, a car pulled up and a man got out. By Mr. Sullivan’s recollection, the conversation went like this:
“Are you Edward Sullivan?” the man asked.
“That’s me,” Mr. Sullivan said.
“Do you have anything on you that I should be worried about?” the man asked.
“Who are you?” Mr. Sullivan replied.
“Police,” the man said. “You’re under arrest.”
A second police officer, in plain clothes like the first, stood by. They handcuffed him and then folded him into their unmarked car.
The officers told him, Mr. Sullivan said, that they had been watching him for several days.
The crime?
He had written “The Jerk,” about three inches high, on a campaign poster for James P. Molinaro, the Staten Island borough president. The undercover officers had taken a picture of the poster. There was no question that Mr. Sullivan had written it; moreover, there was no doubt that for weeks before that, he had launched far more pungent strikes against Mr. Molinaro in letters to a newspaper and public officials, criticizing the borough president’s plans to develop part of the Staten Island waterfront.
Somehow the police had begun an investigation of Mr. Sullivan, 52, a former merchant marine who is now an advocate for environmental protection. He was brought to the 120th Precinct and charged with criminal mischief, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Once the case came to court, the Staten Island district attorney declined to prosecute him.
Who gave the orders for the police to investigate him? Why would a nearly broke city squander resources on this? And by the way, what about freedom of speech?
Representatives of the Bloomberg administration, the New York Police Department and Mr. Molinaro’s office did not respond to these and other questions. So far, no one has explained why the government used its power of arrest against Mr. Sullivan.
Since early 2003, the Police Department has been given more power to investigate political activities that, in its view, might pose a threat to public order. Getting such powers for the police was a major policy initiative of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly; and the corporation counsel, Michael A. Cardozo.
Yet the Sullivan case could be rooted in a long custom of police and political entanglements on Staten Island. In January 2001, a city employee named Terence Hunter wrote to the borough president at the time, Guy V. Molinari, to complain about the closing of a community center in a predominantly black neighborhood. He compared it to a “high-tech lynching” and accused Mr. Molinari of being the type of person who would approve of a lynching — including a picture of the low-tech kind in the letter.
The day after Mr. Hunter’s letter arrived at the borough president’s office, five officers from the Intelligence Division came to his home. He was arrested, photographed, fingerprinted and interrogated. He said he was ordered to write an explanation of the letter. After spending the night in a cell, he was released from the courthouse the next day without charge.
He sued. Had the case gone through the normal process for city lawsuits, he and his lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union would have had a chance to question officials under oath about how he had come to be arrested. Instead, city lawyers offered him $200,000 for his night in jail. He took it.
“The city clearly was in a rush to settle Hunter so as to keep us from delving into the relationship between the N.Y.P.D. on Staten Island and the borough president’s office,” said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Now Mr. Sullivan, too, has sued. Once again, the use of police resources in a political debate will be a central issue. The posters themselves appear to have been put up illegally. Given that, it is unlikely that writing on one of them, as Mr. Sullivan did, would violate any law.
Last summer, in letters to The Staten Island Advance and to elected officials, Mr. Sullivan criticized Mr. Molinaro (who succeeded the nearly identically named Mr. Molinari in 2002) over the private development of 36 shorefront acres, saying it was a betrayal of the public trust.
Mr. Sullivan — who is fighting cancer and hoping for a liver transplant from someone with type O-positive blood — said the arrest had worn him down.
The circumstances of his arrest are too important to be explored only in a civil case, which often winds up being simply a matter of dollars and cents. The City Council is supposed to watch over the executive branch of government, including the police. A lawsuit does not freeze the rest of democracy. Nor is it a substitute.
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2010, on page LI1 of the New York edition.
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