Borough Park, Brooklyn, NY - City Begins Probe Of Cop's Actions In Mayhem
Borough Park, Brooklyn, NY - The city's Civilian Complaint Review Board has started investigating the NYPD's response to last week's fiery mayhem in this heavily Chasidic area of Brooklyn.
The board, which probes allegations of police abuse, got 14 complaints after mobs, who falsely believed cops had beaten 75-year-old Arthur Schick during an April 4 traffic stop in Borough Park, ran amok.
Review Board officials said that it could be months before the probe is complete. "We're in the very early stages," said board Executive Director Florence Finkle.
One of the 14 complaints was filed by Schick, who cops pulled over for talking on his cell phone while driving and blocking traffic at 16th Ave. and 47th St. Cops say he became belligerent and refused to hand over his registration and driver's license.
Schick says cops forcefully pushed him into a police van and then used the N-word.
Another complaint alleges that Chief of Department Joseph Esposito yelled to other cops during the protests: "Get the .... Jews out of here!"
Esposito has admitted using inappropriate language but has denied uttering anything anti-Semitic. Police officials have said he shouted, "Get these .... people out of here!"
As many as 12 other people allege they were roughed up by cops during the chaos but none of them was injured.
posted by VOS IZ NEIAS @ 4/16/2006 11:16:00 PM
12 Comments:
At 11:21 AM,
Anonymous said…
Kudos to Chief of Department Joseph Esposito for speaking his mind.
The Hasidic Jews have been getting special treatment from the police for years in Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Borough Park.
At 11:59 AM,
Anonymous said…
TO Angelo Grieco of Fort Myers:
And what is that 'special' treatment that they get? Instead of just passing on rumors, why don't you provide facts?
Enough with false accusations. The fact remains that the hasidic jews get no more special treatment than any other community.
Either put up or shut up!
At 12:04 PM,
Anonymous said…
Shame on you – self hating Jew! What a Chutzpah!
Op-Ed piece by Lt. Jason Margolis President of NYPD Shomrim Society titled Shame of Boro Park.
While racial slurs and epithets by decorated Police Officers are a far removed from the moral equivalent of Nazi era oppression, it still is an ugly form of Anti Semitism and must be decried as such.
Lt. Margolis there were no riots in Boro Park there was no mass looting, destruction of property or personal injury, as most certainly would have been the reaction in other minority communities in this city. The
misbehavior of two three individuals does not impeach the entire community.
The crowd simply protested police brutality in a relatively peaceful manner and the egotistical cops over reacted.
Note:
Jason Margolis is a resident of Queens NY and has no connection to Boro Park.
The NYPD Shomrim Society is a Fraternal Police Organization whose mission is the benefit of Police Officers, not as their name may imply "the protectors of the community."
At 12:05 PM,
Anonymous said…
I was ounce arrested in b.p. and the police said when he took me in the station I got 2 f,,, Jews here.
At 12:09 PM,
Anonymous said…
As a Jew I am disgusted by how the rioters compared the behavior of the NYPD, which was just doing its job, to Nazis and Stalinists.
It is time for every group that feels the need to whine about something petty to stop using these serious words in such a cheap manner.
No one in Borough Park was being sent to the gas chambers, having religious freedoms revoked or property confiscated illegally.
Stoking the flames of violence with shrill cries of racism in response to such innocuous events is to be expected from hypocritical reverse-racist demagogues like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson or Louis Farrakhan.
However, the residents of Borough Park should have known better.
At 3:56 PM,
Anonymous said…
Anonymous said...
I was ounce arrested in b.p. and the police said when he took me in the station I got 2 f,,, Jews here.
12:05 PM
----------------------------------
Next time you gotta use that Forbidden 4 letter word ,please dont refrain from spelling it out because chances are very high that you will not spell it correctly in the first place.
ounce twise ouit!
At 5:35 PM,
Anonymous said…
Councilman Simcha Felder should be arrested for inciting a riot.
Instead of acting as an elected official, he chose to increase tensions by claiming anti-Semetic slurs were made by police officials.
Felder is hardly half the leader that Esposito is. New York City should be proud to have a leader like Chief Esposito running our police department.
At 9:24 PM,
Anonymous said…
It is time for Chief Esposito to retire ~!! he showed last week hes true colors,,, God Bless Felder for not bending or being scared to dose mochers in BP for trying to kiss Esposito,, even though he all dumped them a while ago...
At 12:09 AM,
Anonymous said…
For more than two years, it was my honor and privilege to serve under the command of Chief Joseph Esposito.
Chief Esposito is one of the most widely respected leaders in the history of the NYPD and one of the finest men I have ever known.
He has devoted over 30 years of his life to serving the people of New York City without regard to race or religion.
It was his strength and steadfastness that held the NYPD together on 9/11 and through the terrible time that followed.
You should think twice before using the words of a few apologists for a rioting mob as statements of fact in a headline.
At 10:06 AM,
Anonymous said…
With Passover upon us, Jewish communities across the city, nation and world have been furiously preparing for one of the holiest periods on the liturgical calendar. Holiday preparations in Borough Park, however, had taken on a decidedly different spin this year. Last week, the largely Hasidic population of the usually quiescent Central Brooklyn neighborhood abandoned their Seder preparations and disposal of chometz (leavened bread) to engage in a riot.
After two police officers in the 66th Precinct attempted to arrest 75-year-old Arthur Schick for refusing to cooperate after he was pulled over for talking on his cell phone while driving, all hell broke loose. Rumors quickly swirled through the tight-knit community that police had used excessive force and ethnic slurs in arresting Schick, and roughly 1,000 Hasidic Jews stormed the streets. They burned garbage, smashed car windows and engaged in all of the activities one would typically assign to an angry mob (though there is evidence that some of the violence might have been instigated by non-Hasidim).
End result? Two arrests besides Schick, and a police commander under fire. Chief Joseph J. Esposito, a former commander of the 66th Precinct himself and by all accounts no anti-Semite, has been accused by City Councilman Simcha Felder of saying “Get these fucking Jews out of here,” when he was unable to keep himself in politically correct check while trying to handle an unruly mob of, well, Jews. Esposito admits that he cursed, but substituted “people” for Jews. Felder has backed off, as well, saying now that he never actually saw Esposito say what he said he said, but that he recognized the police chief’s voice when he said it.
Police, speaking to me and others, can all agree on one thing: Esposito’s career is over. Whether he did it or not, Esposito has tangled with Brooklyn’s Hasidic community—one of, if not the most, powerful political blocks in the city. New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents the area, has assured observers that this is not about exacting a pound of flesh on the community’s behalf.
“We don’t want his head. We want an apology,” Hikind told a reporter.
But that’s not the way things work in the real world.
The political power of the Brooklyn Hasidim is not to be denied. The neighborhood votes for those politicians whom they perceive delivers for them. The ultra-Orthodox Jews, who trace their origins back to Eastern Europe in the 17th century, gave Mayor Michael Bloomberg a better than a six-to-one margin over Fernando Ferrer in last year’s election and a better than three-to-one margin over Mark Green in 2001.
How did the Mayor deliver this time around? By backing off from outlawing a very controversial practice to the City as a whole but a very common ritual to the Hasidic themselves.
Metzitzah b’peh is a variation on the traditional circumcision performed in Jewish communities. The rabbi performing the circumcision, or mohel, will draw blood away from the baby’s penis with his mouth to clean the wound during the practice, which has been abandoned by most Jews.
But in the Hasidic community the practice is still commonplace, with supporters estimating that anywhere between 2,000 and 4,000 of such circumcisions occur each year. After the city’s Department of Health linked the practice to several cases of herpes among babies last year, the city took a serious look at outlawing metzitzah b’peh, but eventually agreed to allow its continuation, implementing a campaign asking parents to choose another way instead.
New York City Health Department Commissioner Thomas Frieden called it one of the most delicate issues he has ever had to deal with. But imagine if it had been a Catholic priest performing the same exact ritual. It is hard to believe that the issue would have been just as “delicate.”
Catholics, though—or any other interest group in the city—do not vote nearly as monolithically as Hasidic Jews. Even other sects of Judaism don’t stand firmly together in such numbers. The voting power of Hasidic Jews made what would have probably been an easy decision to ban what is at best a questionable practice almost impossible. The public-health campaign put together by Frieden raised the hackles of the Hasidic community, many of whom felt that Bloomberg’s administration was set to leave the issue alone altogether, and implemented the information campaign after the election so as to trick the community to remain supportive of him.
We have yet to have a great circumcision riot in Borough Park. The Hasidic community usually takes their agenda to the ballot box, seldom engaging in the more fiery organizing tactics like those that were witnessed last week.
But what becomes of the next police officer who stops a Hasidic Jew for any reason at all? Will he or she have to endure, at best, comparisons to the Nazis or, at worst, stand in the center of a full scale riot? Will they even have the chutzpah to stop a Hasidic Jew at all? If Esposito gets fired, who knows? The Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn may have found a new way to exercise their political power: by taking it to the streets.
At 10:09 AM,
Anonymous said…
Two Orthodox politicians in Brooklyn are embroiled in a growing controversy over their claims that the police were responsible for a riot last week in the Hasidic enclave of Boro Park and that a top officer had used an anti-Jewish epithet.
Council member Simcha Felder and State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, both Democrats, voiced their allegations in the days following the April 4 disturbance, in which hundreds of Hasidim took to the streets to protest the arrest of an elderly man after he was pulled over for talking on his cell phone while driving. Hikind blamed aggressive police tactics for escalating the situation; Felder alleged that the NYPD's chief of department, Joseph Esposito, referred to the rioters as "f—-ing Jews."
The department issued a statement denying that Esposito uttered any slurs during the incident, but acknowledged that he had used profanity. In recent days, however, it was Hikind and Felder who found themselves coming under criticism for claims of exaggerating charges of inappropriate police behavior and deflecting responsibility for the incident from neighborhood residents.
Jason Margolis, president of the Jewish police officers association, NYPD Shomrim Society, published an opinion article in the New York Post decrying as "fabrications" and "slander" claims that the police acted like Nazis, or that Esposito yelled, "Get the f—-ing Jews out of here!" during the melee. Margolis, while not referring to Felder and Hikind by name, called efforts to "justify the outrageous behavior" of the community "despicable."
Shomrim honored Esposito in October for his commitment to New York's Jewish community.
Speaking April 5, the day after the riot, Hikind decried what he perceived to be heavy-handed police tactics. "This is not the Intifadah in Ramallah in the Middle East," the assemblyman said. In a conversation with the Forward this week he stood by his assertion that the police overreacted, telling the story of a 90-year-old man who was hospitalized after being knocked down during the fracas. But, Hikind also said, "there was no excuse in the world for how some in the community acted." His constituents in Boro Park, he added, are largely "embarrassed and shocked" by the incident.
"The whole idea is to learn from our mistakes, and that applies to all sides," Hikind said.
Felder declined to comment for this article.
The incident began when local residents gathered on the streets of Boro Park to protest what they perceived as heavy-handed tactics during the arrest of Arthur Schick, a 75-year-old Orthodox Jew. Ignoring police orders to disperse, the crowd of largely Hasidic youth began lighting bonfires in the street and chanting, "No justice, no peace."
Writing in Sunday's New York Times, the City University of New York's Professor Samuel Heilman seized on the chant — traditionally associated with the black civil rights movement — as evidence of the growing awareness to the outside world of a community that often prides itself on its isolationism. "These Orthodox Jews have learned how a beleaguered and threatened minority in this city can respond when it wants to rein in the police or the powerful," Heilman wrote.
At 3:20 PM,
Anonymous said…
let's not forget, the police is employed by the public, and is supposed to represent us.
The way we all saw it in the NYPD RANT, these people are low life nuts and should be sent to the sanitation dept.
Not for nothing were these NYPD officers not accepted into the police force in Orange, Rockland, LI, etc, where the wpay is 3-4 times more. These are the lowest of this society, just very good at cursing and slander.
I observed being in the city, these guys always pass red lights, put on their lights just to get through any busy point and then close it.
The cops in Rockland who get paid in the six figures, know better, and would never pass a red light. They say they need to be a model for everyone to follow the law, and THIS is their only duty and responsibility, not like these ranters who just want some respect.
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