Tag Archives: New York City

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Police Violence: An Anti-Obscenity Proposal

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NYPD Communications Division van #4018 at Hera...
NYPD Communications Division van #4018 at Herald Square. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s not surprising when Ed Mullins leaps to the defense of police officers accused of murder or other criminal abuses. After all, he’s president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, a New York City police union. Protecting cops is his job.

In a July 14 column for the New York Post, Mullins decries the city’s $5.9 million settlement with the family of Eric Garner, who died at the hands — literally, from a “chokehold” — of officer Daniel Pantaleo. The settlement, wrote Mullins, is “obscene.”

I agree with Mullins. It IS obscene. The taxpayers of New York City should never have been forced to compensate Garner’s family for his death. Those taxpayers didn’t kill Eric Garner. Daniel Pantaleo did.

Of course, Mullins wouldn’t agree with how I put that. He doesn’t call the settlement obscene because he wants Pantaleo to pay. He objects because taxpayer money paid to Pantaleo’s victims can’t be paid to members of the Sergeants Benevolent Association.

Still, I have to credit Mullins with inspiring my proposal for consideration by his association, by New York City, and by police unions and city governments everywhere: Insurance.

Yes, insurance. Cities should require every police officer in their employ to carry a $10 million liability policy for torts inflicted while on duty. Prosecuting cops for crimes committed in uniform is always a dicey proposition, but there’s no reason the civil end can’t work like any other insurance situation. There’s a claim. If it’s denied, there’s a lawsuit, a verdict or a settlement, and the insurer coughs up any damages instead of sticking the taxpayers with the check.

With unionized departments, of course, the insurance requirement will have to be negotiated into the labor contract. As will a clause making uninsurable cops subject to immediate dismissal from the force and ejection from the union.

If that sounds like a bitter pill for an Ed Mullins to swallow, here’s the sugar coating: There’s no reason the unions can’t provide the insurance policies themselves: Collect the premiums as part of each member’s union dues and set them aside in trust for rainy days when claims get paid. Eventually — if the actuaries get it right — profits will flow into the union’s general fund. That prospect should warm any union president’s heart.

An insurance scheme of this kind will also incentivize the thin blue line to police its own. If insurance premiums go up, cops and union reps will know which comrades to have a “come to Jesus” talk with.

Pandemic police violence is a problem that will be solved, one way or another. This is a way for Mullins to stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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A Suicide in Brooklyn

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RGBStock.com Police RaidMaraschino cherry mogul Arthur Mondella put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger on February 24. He was 57. New York City’s medical examiners will no doubt rule his death a suicide. But Mondella was really the latest victim of a multi-billion dollar industry: Drug prohibition.

Why did Mondella lock himself in the bathroom at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries — a company his grandfather founded in 1948, and which annually produces more than a billion of the sweet, syrupy little treats that top America’s desserts — ask his sister to take care of his children, and kill himself?

Because police, posing as “environmental inspectors,” discovered (as they suspected) that in addition to producing cherries, Mondella was using the factory to run a marijuana business. After five hours of tearing the place apart, they found a false wall hiding 80 pounds of cannabis and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

Mondella ran a second business behind the scenes. As with his cherry business, he provided a desired product to willing customers, leaving both parties better off than before the exchange. Unfortunately for him, that second business ran afoul of a set of evil laws maintained well past their “okay, that didn’t work” dates for the purpose of keeping government bureaucrats and “non-profit” executives employed.

In 2015 alone, one federal bureaucracy — the Office of National Drug Control Policy — will spend more than $25 billion taxpayer dollars hunting down and caging or killing entrepreneurs like Mondella. That’s not counting the expenditures of state and local law enforcement agencies, or the tens of millions raised and spent by “non-profit” propaganda shops like DARE and the Partnership for Drug Free Kids.

Drug prohibition is big business. Not the kind of business Arthur Mondella ran, though. It isn’t the  win-win proposition that defines legitimate enterprise.  Drug prohibition’s “products” are people jailed, people killed, property seized. Its “transactions” harm  everyone except the fat cats who run its various divisions and subsidiaries.

In 1971,  a young Vietnam veteran testifying before Congress against the war, John Kerry (now US Secretary of State), wondered “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

America’s tragic history of marijuana prohibition seems to be slowly drawing to an end as more and more states legalize it for medical and, lately, recreational use.  Unfortunately Arthur Mondella probably won’t be its last casualty.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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