Is There a Secret NYPD Division Working for Wall Street?

There is certainly no lack of reasons for outrage when discussing the recent behavior of either the NYPD or Wall Street, but a story that has been making the rounds in the blogosphere is enough to cure the most severe case of outrage fatigue: the existence of a quasi-private “Paid Detail Unit” within the force that is directly employed by private corporations, including financial firms. The obvious implication made is that these officers have been acting in the interests of their private employers when dealing with the Occupy Wall Street protests and are responsible for the recent instances of escalation and deceptive tactics that have been observed and alleged. Can such cartoon-villain levels of corruption be real?

The article by anti-corruption activist Pam Martens details the arrangement implemented under Giuliani’s reign in 1998. Instead of hiring private security guards, corporations like Goldman Sachs and the now-defunct Lehman Brothers pay off-duty police officers salaries averaging $37 an hour to patrol or perform other police work in a given location. These officers retain their NYPD uniform and gun as well as their power of arrest.

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly wrong with this arrangement. Theoretically, the private donors are simply giving the police more resources to do their usual job. According to the Daily News, “if cops see a crime being committed where they are working, they are officially off the business’ payroll as of that moment – and are expected to respond just as they would if they were off-duty.” In the same article, the unit’s commanding officer offers the following justification:

“The officers get a chance to earn extra income,” he said. “Stores and other organizations get additional security, and the public benefits by having a uniformed presence over and above what’s normally on duty.”

However, Martens points out a fundamental problem with this mixing of private funds and public servants:

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. 

There is evidence to suggest that the last bit is not merely an academic matter. The officers are, in theory, not empowered to act beyond their usual legal authority. In practice, however, the program has resulted in lawsuits, such as the one brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union in April 2009 on behalf of a man who was forcibly restrained and ejected from Yankee Stadium by Paid Detail officers for attempting to go to the bathroom during “God Bless America”. Martens also points out recent corruption scandals in the New Orleans Police Department involving “cash payments to police in the Paid Detail and members of the department setting up limited liability corporations to run upwards of $250,000 in Paid Detail work billed to the city.”

More relevantly to current events, Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars cites a pending class action lawsuit against the city by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund over the 700 arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge, in which some of the unnamed defendants are referred to as “unidentified law enforcement officials, officers or agents who, although not employed by the NYPD, did engage in joint action with the NYPD and its officials, officers and agents to cause the mass false arrest of the plaintiff class.”

While all of the above evidence is certainly alarming, I think there is fairly little here to suggest that there is a deliberate or coordinated effort by the Paid Detail or their sponsors to suppress the Occupy Wall Street protests. Firstly, the Crooks and Liars article itself suggests that the unnamed defendants in the Brooklyn Bridge case may be federal agents (a possibility that I find even more troubling). Secondly, it’s hard to imagine that the corporate class takes the protests that seriously to begin with, and in any case, the arrests and overreactions by police have mostly helped the movement by attracting media attention and sympathy. But most importantly, there is simply no reason to suspect any outside influence when the NYPD’s response to Occupy Wall Street has been entirely consistent with their past conduct and, if anything, more restrained than their reaction during the 2004 RNC protests.

What actually worries me is the very fact of the Paid Detail’s existence and its implications for our democracy. It’s fairly unsurprising that corporations have often made donations to the police, perhaps implicitly in exchange for extra protection. But when private entities are able to use their wealth to directly affect the distribution of a public resource by literally renting and commanding police units, the basic principle of equal protection for all under the law is threatened. The fact that some of the peasants who happen to live next to the banks get to reap the side benefit of added police presence does not justify this.

It is rather ironic that these corporations donate millions to the NYPD and receive accolades for helping the city’s budget while spending millions more to fight tooth and nail against the slightest tax increase. But this should not surprise us. The right wing has long attempted to fund only the parts of government that they like; now their core constituency has found a way to do so without going through the inconvenient legislative process. One of the pillars of a democracy is that everyone has a stake in the functioning of our government. What happens when those with means can simply order the government services they want a la carte while lobbying to starve the rest?

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