In recent months, the Village Voice and Daily News have reported on incidents where New Yorkers claimed that they tried to make a crime complaint to police, but were rebuffed.
Consider now, the story of Mayra Hernandez, a Staten Island woman who says that two patrol officers assured her they would report her complaint about someone shelling her home with fireworks, yet the police department says they have no such report.
Under the NYPD Patrol Guide, one of the core duties of a police officer is to take criminal complaints from civilians. Recent accounts showed that officers were ordered to discourage people from filing complaints by referring them to the precinct.
According to Hernandez, however, the officers simply lied to her. They assured her that they’d report the incident to Staten Island’s 120th precinct and also advised her to go to the station house if harassment continued.
“The police said they were going to file a report and handle it,” Hernandez said. “So I didn’t see a need to go at that moment.”
The commanding officer of the 120, John Denesopolis, denied knowing about the incident.
“I never heard anything about it,” Denesopolis said. “There’s no way that could have happened.”
At approximately 10:50 last Sunday night, three of Hernandez’s daughters heard a brief series of explosions.
“It sounded like cherry bombs going off all around the house,” one of the girls said. “Then we smelled smoke. And when my sister Anita went out side to see what was going on, she found nails near the tires of my father’s car.”
The sisters said they called 911 repeatedly to no avail, until their furious mother ran to the patrol officers around the corner on Port Richmond Avenue.
(A cell phone that belonged to one of Hernandez’s daughters showed 911 calls that night at 11:15, 11:32 and 12:23. They also said that they called once from their home phone.)
The incident took place in Port Richmond, a neighborhood fortified with police since late July, because of a spate of bias attacks against Mexicans in the area.
Despite Port Richmond’s dense Mexican population, Hernandez and her family said there are few, if any, other Mexican families on their block. They suspected that neighbors were responsible for the attack.
“It’s ridiculous that my family is the only one getting attacked,” one daughter, Ednita said. “I have neighbors who have shown their discrimination against us.”
Deputy Inspector Denesopolis, however, also doubts the existence of any blocks in Port Richmond with a paucity of Mexican families.
“I find that very hard to believe,” the commander said.
Ok, so here we have a commanding officer aloof to the diversity of a neighborhood in his precinct, where simmering ethnic tensions exploded this year.
Furthermore, two Queens police officers, part of an impact operation in response to bias attacks on Mexicans, didn’t even report an alleged attack on a Mexican family.
Oh, and at least three 911 calls in which no officers responded, despite a mobile command center, two sky-watch towers and phalanx of patrolmen around the corner.
It doesn’t seem related to the department wide corruption recently reported, according to John Eterno, an associate dean of graduate studies in criminal justice at Molly College. A retired NYPD captain who now studies police malfeasance, Eterno added that the police seemed to have acted negligently.
“If it was a bias incident, that could be a big deal,” Eterno said. “If there’s a pattern, if it turns more severe, you’ll need that paper trail.”
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