The NYPD has a long history of taking retaliatory action against members who speak out against a problem or refuse to cave to pressure to do the wrong thing. Sometimes the retaliation is targeted at PBA delegates who are vocal in their defense of our members. In the NYPD, the squeaky wheel gets reassigned or transferred.

As Pat Lynch has said so often, this PBA administration is dedicated to defending its officers and protecting their rights.  When a delegate is targeted, we will use every resource possible to defend our members’ defenders. Without a strong union and strong delegates who feel assured of the union’s backing when the heat is on, the officer on the beat doesn’t have a chance against the bosses.

The PBA fights the department’s unlawful acts through the system, filing grievances, and ultimately taking issues to binding arbitration or the courts. With each grievance and challenge, we send a strong message to the department that it must respect our members’ rights and the lawful role our delegates play in fighting for those rights. The PBA is strong, determined and persistent in its challenge of the department’s improper or unlawful acts against our members and delegates.

Today, there’s more pressure than ever on police officers and bosses. Staffing shortages and the extra burden of fixed terrorism posts, special events, anti- and pro-war protests — all these are piled on top of the pressure to keep crime down. It creates an atmosphere that tempts bosses to bend the contract and other rules or to fudge crime stats to keep One Police    Plaza happy. 

Frankly, the only thing sparing City hall a public outcry to hire more police is the consistently rosy crime-stat picture. The city administration has been using the crime rate to justify NYPD staff and budget cuts. The city says crime continues to decrease because the NYPD is doing more with less. Baloney. 

The truth is, today’s crime reduction is a paper tiger, a clerical decrease. The streets are not nearly as safe as City Hall and Police Plaza want the public to think. And when members or delegates challenge their “paper tiger,” the department seeks to punish them to discourage others from speaking the truth.

Case in point: 50 Pct. Delegate Joe Anthony, who challenged an officer’s punitive reassignment for refusing to downgrade a crime.

In the spring of 2002, the New York Post reported an allegation that the 50 command was “cooking the books” to improve crime stats. At the time, precinct C.O. Thomas DiRusso’s prospective promotion to deputy inspector wasn’t helped by an Internal Affairs investigation of the command “for allegedly doctoring crime statistics.” DiRusso incorrectly believed Anthony was the source of the Post story. From that time on, the captain refused to recognize Anthony’s union status and pursued a personal vendetta against him.

   The problem was compounded when a police officer responded to the scene of a past attempted larceny. The storeowner gave the officer an itemized list and the value of the merchandise the perp tried to steal. It totaled over $1,800, making the crime an attempted grand larceny by definition. A lieutenant ordered the officer to downgrade the crime to a misdemeanor with a $500 value and when the officer refused, the lieutenant threatened the officer. The crime was written up as a misdemeanor but the officer noted the lieutenant’s order to do so in the report.

The officer was immediately reassigned from a regular RMP to foot patrol. That’s when Anthony stepped in to argue that the reassignment was retaliation for the officer’s refusal to downgrade and demanded his reinstatement to RMP duty. The officer was restored to the original assignment but the conflict put Anthony squarely in the ambitious precinct commander’s cross-hairs. 

The angry C.O. began a systematic campaign against the delegate that included hyper-critical memos to the Special Monitoring Unit, claiming that Anthony was out on a line-of-duty injury. The C.O. also took it upon himself to prepare Anthony’s evaluation reports and gave him a bad evaluation when Anthony’s direct supervisor had given him a good one.

Finally, one day after it was announced that Joe Anthony would be running on PBA President Pat Lynch’s re-election team, Anthony was transferred from the 50 to the 106 Pct. and given an assignment that prevented him from effectively representing the 50 officers who had elected him. There’s no doubt Anthony was transferred because of his union activities, a clear contract violation. 

An internal file from the Special Monitoring System stated: “Captain DiRusso’s request that the officer be transferred immediately was based on the fact that he is a PBA delegate with influence over the other officers in his command, which he uses negatively.”

But the department’s attempt to silence Anthony backfired. At the March 2003 PBA delegates’ meeting, Bronx Trustee Scott Williamson made a motion to make Joe Anthony a “delegate-at-large,” which was unanimously supported by Pat Lynch and the meeting’s 400 delegates. 

Appointing Joe Anthony delegate-at-large served a couple of purposes. First, it made a strong, vocal and committed delegate available to all our members and, more importantly, it told the department that screwing with a good delegate makes that delegate more powerful, not less. The department only makes its problems worse by punishing our delegates for being effective.

Anthony’s case is only one in a long string of retaliation cases directed against PBA delegates. Other cases where the PBA has challenged and reversed the department’s unlawful interference with official union business:

• Manhattan South Financial Secretary Walter Liddy was denied access to Internal Affairs interrogations of members regarding possible police misconduct in December 1999. In public statements, the department labeled Liddy a potential witness, then a witness and finally a subject of the investigation to prevent him from counseling the officers he represents. The PBA legal team went to State Supreme Court and successfully enjoined the department from continuing to interrogate officers if Liddy was barred.

• In April 2000, in a grievance the PBA brought to binding arbitration, the arbitrator found that Delegate Jorge Rivera was transferred from his assignment as a warrant officer in the 41 Pct. in retaliation for his vigorous representation of the officers in his command. The arbitrator ordered Rivera restored to similar duties.

• John Wohlberg, a 34-year veteran of the NYPD and an active and vocal delegate for more than 26 years, was inappropriately reassigned to another shift for challenging, among other things, the Bronx borough commander’s cancellation of RDOs for non-essential work. The PBA grieved the issue and had Wohlberg restored to a favorable assignment with back pay adjustments to compensate for losses due to his unlawful reassignment. 

These are just a few of the dozens of departmental actions the PBA has successfully challenged. 

At some point, you think they’d learn.