The Electric City Sees Its Police In a Harsh Light; Officers' Pranks and Crimes Hit Home in Schenectady
By DAN BARRY
Published: August 17, 2001
Sign in to Recommend
Twitter
Sign In to E-Mail
Print
. .Correction Appended
SCHENECTADY, N.Y.— Suspecting that David Sampson was up to no good but having no proof, the two white police officers chose instead to take him for a ride that summer's evening in 1999. A long, long ride.
They drove in silence, ignoring the young black man's questions as their patrol car crossed the city limits and continued 11 miles deep into the countryside's enveloping dusk. ''I kept asking them 'Where am I going?' over and over, 15, 16 times,'' Mr. Sampson, 29, said recently. ''I was really scared.''
They came to a stop on a gravel road. While his partner stayed behind the wheel, Officer Richard Barnett later recalled, he removed their passenger's boots, tossed them into the surrounding trees and told Mr. Sampson ''to get out and have a nice walk back to Schenectady.'' Then the car, emblazoned with the name of the Schenectady Police Department, sped into the darkness, its back seat emptied.
This is Schenectady, where the police do things differently. Officer Barnett later said under oath that it was ''common practice for a lot of midnight shifts taking intoxicated people out of the city.'' It was called ''relocation,'' he said, and had been the source of great amusement among officers.
The locker-room mirth has ended. A continuing federal investigation so far has led to the convictions of Officer Barnett and his partner, Michael Siler, for crimes beyond the Sampson case, and two other officers were recently indicted. Meanwhile, the United States Department of Justice is determining whether a pattern of civil-rights abuses was spawned from Police Headquarters here on Liberty Street.
The inquiries have helped to expose systemic problems in a 165-member police force in a tough city of 62,000 that still aches from the extensive cutbacks at General Electric, its dominant employer. Schenectady has enough problems, people here say, without this.
''It's the department's culture and lack of supervision that has unleashed officers to do simply what they please,'' said Kevin Luibrand, a civil-rights lawyer who has developed an expertise in Schenectady police practices. ''That's the common theme in the whole situation: they don't feel limited.''
Chief Gregory T. Kaczmarek, a 25-year police veteran and son of a Schenectady officer, acknowledged that the department's procedures are inadequate and that some officers have an arrogant sense of entitlement. But he said that he has brought the concept of internal affairs from theory to practice, and was working to make a department chock full of good officers more professional.
But Chief Kaczmarek has his own image problems. Earlier this year he admitted that he had purposely lied to the City Council about a detail relating to the Sampson case because he wanted to find the source of leaks to the news media. And a few months ago he had to apologize to the Council for engaging in some off-color banter while appearing on a morning shock-jock radio program -- with the mayor.
Those incidents, along with almost daily allegations about boorish behavior by the police --- from paying a prostitute with crack at an officer's bachelor party to hassling a civilian simply for wearing an F.B.I. cap -- have solidified the perception that yahoos are policing the Electric City.
Between sips of coffee in a Police Department lounge decorated with a signed photograph of Rodney Dangerfield from the comic's visit to town in 1977, Chief Kaczmarek did not dispute the cumulative damage of these episodes.
''I think we're in the middle of some casualties,'' he said. ''And I think I might be one of them.''
The Schenectady Police Department has had its share of problems over the years. In 1989, for example, five officers were implicated in the beating of a local man mistakenly thought to be wanted for murder. The case prompted a sloppy cover-up, a $1.75 million settlement -- and no internal investigation.
But things perked up for the department in April 1999, when the state's Court of Appeals ruled that the city could keep secret the names and records of 16 Schenectady officers involved in the celebrated ''egg case'' of 1997. That was when some off-duty officers -- bar-hopping on a chartered bus -- threw eggs at another vehicle, then got into an ugly confrontation with its driver.
For years, recurring complaints had circulated in the Hamilton Hill and Mont Pleasant neighborhoods: of police officers taking people for one-way rides, shaking down drug dealers, and exchanging crack for information. When she first heard these same stories, ''I could feel it here,'' said Olivia Adams, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter here, rubbing her arm. ''These were not just the low-lifes involved; these were decent, hard-working people.''
But Ms. Adams said that city officials ignored their complaints, a charge that Chief Kaczmarek and the city's mayor, Albert P. Jurczynksi, deny. Unfortunately, they said, black leaders had presented them with little more than bad-cop hearsay, so the chief suggested that they buy tape recorders. Frustrated, the black leaders turned to the F.B.I.
Then came the deluge.
In late July 1999, two sisters filed a federal lawsuit alleging that they had been wrongly arrested and beaten at Police Headquarters after one of them sharply spurned the early-morning barroom advances of an off-duty officer. A week later, Mr. Sampson was taken for his one-way trip and, he says, beaten. He made it back by taxi later that night, and within days police officers working the street began bumping into a private investigator hired by Mr. Luibrand, Mr. Sampson's new lawyer.
In mid-August, the mayor and the police chief held a news conference to announce that the lockers of Officers Siler and Barnett had been padlocked and would be searched for evidence, though they declined to say why and the Sampson case had not yet been made public. (It was later revealed that the lockers contained drugs that the officers apparently used to trade for information.)
The city officials also publicly invited the F.B.I. to investigate the department -- an invitation that Daniel J. French, then the United States attorney for the Northern District, later said undermined plans for an undercover investigation. Mayor Jurczynski said last week that he had no idea there was already a federal investigation, and was only trying to stem bad publicity while in the middle of a re-election campaign.
For a while, life in Schenectady calmed down: the two officers were suspended, the mayor was re-elected, the chief kept his job. When Officers Siler and Barnett were indicted in August 2000 -- on drug and extortion charges unrelated to the Sampson case -- dozens of police officers attended the arraignment, their close-cropped hair and navy-blue police-union shirts providing for a menacing form of solidarity.
But a month later, Officer Barnett admitted in a plea agreement that he and his partner once paid an informer with crack that they had just extorted from a drug dealer. He also agreed to cooperate in the federal investigation.
Officer Siler hung tough for several months afterward. So tough, in fact, that in July the police union changed its charter so that it could make up to $25,000 in union funds available to help indicted officers with legal fees. But a few days later, Officer Siler pleaded guilty to a federal racketeering charge and agreed to cooperate as well.
The other two implicated officers are among the most decorated and well regarded in the department: Michael Hamilton, who is charged with tipping off an informer to a police surveillance, and Nicola Messere, who is accused of paying an informer with crack. Both men maintain their innocence.
A couple of months before his arrest, Officer Messere recalled in a deposition that Schenectady officers would sometimes drop an alcohol-addled person at the doorstep of another community's police department and say there was a party inside with ''free food and girls.'' Other departments would often return the favor with a different drunk or drug addict, he said, adding that ''you did it as a joke, and it went back and forth.''
Chief Kaczmarek said that he knew nothing of this ''relocation'' technique, but acknowledged that recollections like Officer Messere's were not helping matters. Searching for an analogy to put the problems of the Police Department in perspective, his thoughts turned to the ''egg case.''
Most of the 16 officers stayed on the bus, he said. And of the six who got off, he said, only three Schenectady police officers threw eggs.
Photos: Chief Gregory T. Kaczmarek, who leads the police force in Schenectady, N.Y., acknowledged that repeated revelations of arrogant, abusive and even criminal behavior by some of his officers have harmed the department's image. A federal inquiry has resulted in the arrests of two officers and the convictions of two others.; Kevin Luibrand, a civil-rights lawyer, displayed pictures of David Sampson, who said he was beaten by the police. (Photographs by Will Waldron for The New York Times)(pg. B1); David Sampson, left, was dumped miles from the city by Officers Richard Barnett, center, and Michael Siler. (Photographs by The Daily Gazette of Schenectady); Albert P. Jurczynksi, Schenectady's mayor, denied that he ignored complaints from black leaders about police misconduct. (Will Waldron for The New York Times)(pg. B
Map of New York highlighting Schenectady.
Logged
