No charges for officer who shot unarmed man
HOUSTON - A Houston police officer will not face any charges for shooting an unarmed man on Christmas day.
It isn’t just gangs who hate snitches, the NYPD can’t stand them either. Today the Times digs into the “blue wall of silence” and while not exactly surprising, it certainly is depressing. Frank Serpico’s warning that “you’ll be the enemy,” is still true more than 40 years later.
Though the NYPD has put more effort (and manpower) into Internal Affairs under the reign of Ray Kelly—and signs asking cops to call numbers like 1-800-Pride-PD and 212-CORRUPT are reportedly all over station houses around the city—evidence suggests that that individual NYPD employees are still ostracizing anyone who reports wrong-doing. Which helps explain why three former detectives and one current one are suing the the department over its anti-snitching culture. In today’s story, the paper of record takes a look at two particular plaintiffs who went to Internal Affairs in the past decade—neither with good results.
The crowd was loud. A cop named Chris Rubino didn’t like the way one of the members of the crowd “looked at him.” So he arrested him.
Rubino ended up getting in more trouble than the arrestee.
That encounter occurred at a party on Lynwood Place. It landed Rubino, then a patrol officer, before the police department’s internal affairs division. He was found to have falsely arrested someone, with no probable cause. He earned a two-day suspension.
The party took place way back in 1998. Until recently, it was one of six times that the conduct of Rubino, now a 45-year-old, 20-year-old veteran of the force who wears sergeant’s stripes, would spark an IA investigation. Five of those six times, police brass found him at fault and disciplined him. (He had one of those punishments voided on an appeal.)
“I struggle to find a valid reason which would validate this injustice,” one supervisor wrote in a memorandum about the Lynwood Place incident..
Now Rubino has come before IA for at least a seventh time. Investigators are looking at, among other questions, whether he violated a department order on citizens’ camera-wielding rights and falsely arrested a woman named Jennifer Gondola in the Temple Street courtyard in the wee hours of June 2. The nightclubs were letting out at the time; the usual mayhem was beginning. Gondola was video-recording what she called Rubino’s violent handling of a male arrestee. He ordered her to turn over the camera; instead, she placed it in her bra. Rubino then ordered a female cop to remove the camera, which he pocketed; and ordered Gondola arrested for “interfering.”
