After Officer’s Racist Post, New York’s Top Judge Demands ‘Zero Tolerance’
A Buffalo area court officer did not face a disciplinary hearing after
he wrote a Facebook post saying George Floyd “deserved what he got.”
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New York’s courts have grappled with how to handle racist conduct within
the system since the death of George Floyd.
New York’s courts have grappled with how to handle racist conduct within
the system since the death of George Floyd. Credit...Jefferson Siegel
for The New York Times
Jonah E. Bromwich <https://www.nytimes.com/by/jonah-e-bromwich>
ByJonah E. Bromwich <https://www.nytimes.com/by/jonah-e-bromwich>
* NYT, Feb. 5, 2021,12:33 p.m. ET
Just daysafter George Floyd’s death
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html>,
a court officer in New York posted two pictures side-by-side on his
Facebook page.
The first image was already instantly recognizable: Mr. Floyd, face
down, with a police officer kneeling on his neck. The second showed the
N.F.L. player Colin Kaepernick, kneeling to bring attention to instances
of police brutality against Black people, among other forms of racism.
“What kneeling one offends you more?” a prewritten caption read.
“Clearly the football player,” the court officer wrote in response. “I’m
sure the suspect deserved what he got.”
The officer, who is from the Buffalo area and has been working for the
court system for almost a decade, was not fired after another employee
brought the post to the attention of the inspector general’s office. He
was not ordered to undergo a disciplinary hearing or required to take
sensitivity training. Although he was suspended for a month, he has
since returned to the job.
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This week, New York’s chief judge, Janet DiFiore, said that settling the
matter without a more thorough accounting had been a “mistake.” In a
memo to the roughly 1,350 judges and 14,000 other employees of the state
court, she wrote that such settlements “inevitably fosters a perception
that such conduct, though penalized, is tolerated within our ranks. It
is not.”
Judge DiFiore said, going forward, any case involving claims of
discriminatory conduct would necessitate a full disciplinary hearing,
the system’s equivalent of a trial. The officials who had been involved
in the decision to settle the officer’s case would be “participating in
immediate anti-bias training,” the judge said.
A court spokesman, Lucian Chalfen, said that Judge DiFiore and the
state’s chief administrative judge, Lawrence Marks, had not known how
the case had been handled until after it was reported on by theNew York
Law Journal in late January.
<https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2021/01/22/in-social-media-post-ny-court-officer-implied-george-floyd-deserved-what-he-got/>“They
were extremely displeased about it,” he said.
Mr. Chalfen said that he was barred from revealing the identity of the
officer who wrote the racist post. But he said Judge DiFiore’s learning
of the lenient measures taken against him had led to her memo.
The Civil Service Employees Association, the union which represents the
officer, would not comment on the specifics of the case, other than to
say in a statement that it did not “condone discrimination of any form,
and we completely agree with the overall premise that workers deserve a
court system free of any discrimination or bias.”
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It said that the change proposed in the Judge’s memo “clearly diminishes
worker rights and may violate our contract.” It also said that it was
investigating whether the proposed change was illegal.
The New York court system’s tolerance for racist conduct from its
personnel has been a subject of heightened scrutiny since Mr. Floyd’s
death. On June 9, Judge DiFiore, spurred by Mr. Floyd’s death,
commissioned a report to look into institutional racism in the court
system. The team tasked with the report was led by Jeh C. Johnson, a
former Homeland Security secretary under President Obama.
Mr. Johnson’s team found thatracism was deeply embedded within the
culture of New York’s court officers
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/nyregion/nyc-courts-racism.html>,
the state’s term for the officials who keep order in the courts. (In
some states, they are known as bailiffs.)
The team found specific instances of racist posts to social media,
including one white officer who had posted a drawing of former President
Barack Obama with a noose around his neck and another who referred to a
Black colleague as “one of the good monkeys.”
“The use of racial slurs by white court officers is common and often
goes unpunished,” the report also said.
Court officers of color told Mr. Johnson’s team “they felt they could
not report incidents of bias for fear of being ostracized by their
fellow officers and facing adverse career consequences from powerful and
entrenched union leaders.” Union leadership itself, they said, was a
“safe haven for racist speech and actions.”
Law enforcement agencies throughout New York have had to contend with
racism in their ranks this year. Earlier this week,a top New York police
official was fired
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/nyregion/nypd-james-kobel-racist-fired.html>after
an internal investigation found that he had posted racist rants
targeting Black, Hispanic and Jewish people. (The official, Deputy
Inspector James F. Kobel, whose role it was to combat workplace
harassment within the department, has denied any wrongdoing.)
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Judge DiFiore addressed the larger racism problem in the courts in her
memo this week.
Racism and other offensive sentiments, the memo said, had an impact upon
the courts that was “immediate, irreparable and completely unacceptable.”
“Our approach to such behavior must be ‘zero tolerance,’” Judge DiFiore
wrote.
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