Ramrod justice

The arrest of three officers from the New York Police Departments for sodomizing an arrestee with an expandable radio antenna on a subway platform provides yet another opportunity to contemplate that strange entity and ask how a society can provide itself with security without turning its agents into a lawless gang.

The story itself is extremely disturbing: Michael Mineo, a young hipster of apparently Puerto Rican origins, whose parents both died of AIDS, has been in trouble with the law. He may or may not have been smoking weed on the subway tracks and may or may not have run away from the officers who thought he was.

What is now pretty clear, however, is that once they caught him, one of the three stuck a metal pipe up his ass causing him severe injury and drawing the attention of several bystanders who heard the kid scream. The other two police officers stood by passively and later covered up the act. Mineo was charged with a misdemeanor and says they threatened him with a felony if he ever complained.

This story would have gone nowhere except for a couple of courageous witnesses and some DNA evidence. A transit guard corroborated part of Mineo’s story to investigators, and Mineo’s DNA eventually was found on the object. Also, the fact that the investigation went forward at all suggests that the NYPD brass aren’t covering up the incident. There’s also a fourth cop who told the truth about his colleagues and whose life undoubtedly will now become hell.

The image of Mineo lying in a hospital bed in a state of extreme emotional and physical pain has been flashing on our local news screens now for weeks, and in his on-camera statements the guy has given viewers a sense of what it means to be assaulted by those who are supposed to protect you. He says he remains fearful and can’t leave his apartment, still has trouble with his bodily functions and generally wonders when he will get his life back. In short, he is describing the aftermath of rape.

The cops’ union president, Patrick Lynch, immediately scoffed at the grand jury indictments as ‘mere accusations,’ which they are not. You don’t get a prosecutor to present charges and win indictments unless there is some evidence behind them, and anyway Lynch doesn’t use the same criteria when someone gets arrested for assaulting a cop. No doubt half the force will turn out to defend these creeps in court as usual since they seem to think total impunity is required for their jobs.

But Mayor Bloomberg and his police commissioner have another job, which is to figure out how to put an end to these depressingly regular incidents and enforce guidelines for police behavior that will properly orient good cops and winnow out the psychopaths and trigger-happy assholes. As the economy continues to tank and unemployment climbs, crime is likely to increase as well. Let’s see if the city can deal with that without making everything worse by allowing the police to be army of occupation.