I swear to God, I feel like I'm speaking a foreign language. Is anyone actually reading what I've written? I've not once defended the cop charging in. He should never had tackled Blake. But if the witness said that's the guy, then his selection of Blake wasn't based on race. His actions, coming in like TJ Hooker on crack probably is. And without a doubt was stupid, and a case of brutality.
If you were the cop in ? and a witness said, that is the guy, what would you do? I'm quite sure rushing in and throwing the dude the ground isn't it. But you'd make contact with him, right? You'd approach the guy. That's all I'm saying.
If the cop had simply walked up to Blake, identified himself and proceeding to interview him, getting Blake's name and ID and maybe even clearing it up, and then thanked Blake for his understanding and walked away making whatever reports are required about the contact, then there would have been no problem. It wasn't the fact that this cop thought Blake was possibly the guilty party. It was everything he physically did.
Yeah, I'm reading what you've written and I'm reading how you contradicted yourself.
But I'm not saying he doesn't think that way or what he did wrong wasn't based on that. What he did in tackling Blake is unacceptable and IMHO, he shouldn't be a cop. I don't think RC or I have defended him at all. But the thread title, Standing while black, makes it sound like Blake was targeted because he was just a black guy standing around minding his own business. The fact is, as a cop, if a witness pointed to Blake and said, "that's the guy," the cop has to investigate. So this cop approaching Blake wasn't an error on the cops part. It's about the only thing that I think the cop did right.
The fact is, Frascatore didn't have a witness who pointed to Blake and said, "that's the guy." How this cop "approached" Blake was an error. He didn't question Blake. He didn't identify himself as a police officer. He attacked Blake.
How Frascatore approached Blake is precisely the heart of the matter.
"It's about the only thing that I think the cop did right."
This is so wrong on such a basic and fundamental level, it's not even funny. It's absurd.
There is not a single incident here. There are two.
One was the identification of James Blake as a suspect in a delivery of fake credit cards. In this, Blake's race was not a factor for the officer. A third party identified him to the officer. Whether that third party was racially motivated or not says nothing about why the police focused on Blake. I agree with rugcat that this was not racially motivated. The "standing while black" is not relevant to why the police took notice of Blake.
The second incident was the apprehension and arrest of James Blake. The violence used, imo, was racially motivated. Clearly, that's speculation at this point. But I believe there is some pretty strong reason for the presumption. This, I think, is where "standing while black" is far more relevant. Would the officer have similarly tackled a random white man in a credit card delivery sting? Technically, we don't know. A great many of us presume not, don't we?
I think the important race issue involved is not how the cop identified Blake as a suspect (eyewitness identification), but rather what the cop did with that information (tackled him instead of calmly walking up to him, identifying himself, and asking a few questions). It's that act that is potentially a race issue, and I think focusing on the identification is a distraction, and a mostly irrelevant distraction. It's of almost zero importance in the incident.
Here's what we do know about Officer Frascatore:
In 2012, a Queens man said, Officer James Frascatore pulled him over for a broken taillight, opened his car door and punched him three times in the mouth, unprovoked.
The following year, another Queens resident claimed, Officer Frascatore punched him in the stomach several times outside a bodega and called him a racial epithet.
Officer Frascatore’s history of excessive force complaints, including at least three filed against him with the Civilian Complaint Review Board in 2013, revealed a pattern of residents claiming they were detained without explanation and mistreated despite complying. It also led some lawyers and residents to criticize the Police Department for not punishing him before he was involved in another rough arrest.
“I don’t know what that dude’s problem is but I’m glad it finally came to somebody who someone would listen to,” said Warren Diggs, who sued Officer Frascatore, claiming that the officer had beaten him in his driveway in 2013.
Those accounts, both made by black men, came to light after a rough arrest by the same officer on Wednesday in which he wrapped an arm around the neck of the retired tennis star James Blake and threw him to the sidewalk after mistaking him for a suspect in a credit card fraud investigation.
rugcat says it's "factually incorrect" to say he's always skeptical of reported acts of police brutality pointing to several examples where he says he wasn't. Fair enough. However, there have been enough other incidents where he
has been skeptical of stories of police misconduct that its not factually incorrect for Amadan to make that remark.
Past acts are indications of future behavior. James Frascatore's history as a member of the NYPD is one of a cop who doesn't mind asserting his authority and if it takes roughing up and smacking down a suspect, that's what he's gonna do. He's a tough, take-no-shit NYPD bad ass. You wanna make a omelet you gotta break some eggs.
This is why is is a mistake for rugcat, Vince524, robjvargas, clintl and anyone else to dismiss out of hand how Frascatore approached Blake by saying Blake's race had nothing to do with it, but the process of how he arrested Black did.
Charging Blake like a bull seeing red=not racial.
Making contact with Blake and taking him down=racial.
Excuse me, but that makes absolutely
no sense. If the arrest was racial, how is the attitude of Frascatore not racial. He has accumulated a previous history of using harsh, excessive and other tactics which are not good policing tactics. Want to guess what the race of Frascatore's previous victims were or is that an irrelevant distraction of zero importance too?
It doesn't matter what the racial motivations of the third party were who provided the cops with a picture of a Black man who slightly resembled Blake, but is at least a shade darker than him. Claiming Frascatore was acting on bad intelligence is nonsense. Even if it was a case of mistaken identity, credit card fraud is a crime that requires the unrestrained use of excessive force?
James Blake's anger at the indignity he suffered at James Frascatore's thuggish hands has grown, not lessened, and he has some specific ideals on how they should be addressed.
An apology from the mayor and the police commissioner ain't gonna get it done.
“I want him to know what he did was wrong, and that in my opinion he doesn’t deserve to ever have a badge and a gun again, because he doesn’t know how to handle that responsibility effectively,” Blake told the Daily News Saturday morning. “He doesn’t deserve to have the same title as officers who are doing good work and are really helping keep the rest of the city safe.”
The positives, Blake said, would be to combat the pervasive problem of excessive force by police, achieving “real change in the form of policies, accountability, making sure all the police force is held accountable for their actions, that (could) change the whole narrative of what seems to be an us-against-them mentality where there is antagonism between the public and the police.
“We really need to change that. And I think if we hold them accountable, we are going to change that,” Blake said, adding that he would be sitting down in the near future with Mayor DiBlasio and police commissioner William Bratton to discuss such changes. Blake said he had spoken to his attorneys about possible legal action against the city, but made it clear that his larger mission was addressing the underlying issues that fueled the incident, saying that goal might be better achieved outside a courtroom.
Asked whether this would’ve happened if he had been Andy Roddick or Mardy Fish, two white tennis contemporaries of his, Blake said, “I don’t want to say that at all because I think that muddies the issue at hand. In this incident it was the excessive force that's really the issue, because it was a nonviolent crime. Even if I was the suspect, this isn’t the way to treat anyone, no matter what. . . . so I think that’s more the issue.
“In terms of the race thing and the fact that this might not have happened to Mardy or Andy, I think there s a time and place for that conversation and I think that’s an extremely important conversation but I don’t want to wrap that around this issue. This issue is different.”
James Blake has never presented himself as any sort of racial trailblazer or Angry Black Man so his reluctance to make this about race. But he's gonna have a tough time making anyone believe Andy Roddick would have gotten the same sort of treatment.
But there's this thing you do, where you become hyperskeptical of every single story involving a cop doing something clearly heinous, in a way you do not on any other subject.
