Updated by Dara Lind
In the wake of Eric Garner's
death, the head of the NYC Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, a police
interest group, blamed Garner: "You cannot resist arrest, that's a
crime." But it's not a crime that most police officers often file reports
about.
The New York Police Department
is made up of 35,000 officers, and just a minority of them have sent people
into court for "resisting arrest."
But the ones who do, according
to a new report from WNYC, charge a lot of people — and that can be a "red
flag" for other issues.
WNYC looked at over 51,000 cases
where someone was charged with "resisting arrest" since 2009. They
found that 40 percent of those cases — over 20,000 — were committed by just 5
percent of all the police officers on the force. And 15 percent of officers
accounted for a majority of all "resisting arrest" charges.
Why "resisting
arrest" cases matter
The upshot of this data is that
charging people with "resisting arrest" is something most cops do
very rarely, and a few cops do a lot. Here's why that matters: if a cop is
routinely hauling people into court for resisting arrest, he might be taking an
overly aggressive attitude toward civilians. A police officer might even, as
police accountability expert Sam Walker told WNYC, use the criminal charge to
cover up his use of excessive force:
"There's a widespread
pattern in American policing where resisting arrest charges are used to sort of
cover - and that phrase is used - the officer's use of force," said
Walker, the accountability expert from the University of Nebraska. "Why
did the officer use force? Well, the person was resisting arrest."
That pattern held up in the
case of Donald Sadowy, a Brooklyn police officer who's the subject of the WNYC
article. Sadowy has more than 20 resisting arrest cases since 2009 — putting
him in the 98th percentile, or higher, among all police. Meanwhile, over the
last two years, Sadowy's been sued 10 times for excessive force.
