New York is very lucky James Blake is such a class act. The former tennis star is making exactly the right complaint about Wednesday’s incident — excessive force, not racial profiling, by the NYPD officer who tackled him.
The cops were on a real case, cracking a ring that used phony credit cards to buy designer shoes. But a witness wrongly identified Blake as one of the perps — whereupon one officer tackled him without any apparent effort at a civil approach.
As Blake said Thursday: “I probably wouldn’t even be so indignant about it if it wasn’t so obvious. It was so blatant…I was standing there doing nothing, not running, not resisting — in fact, smiling.”
After the tackle, the black former pro athlete was pinned to the wall and cuffed for half an hour until the cops realized the mistake.
Blake understands the honest-mistake part — that he strongly resembles the initially identified suspect. Asked by NBC’s Robin Roberts, “This was a case of excessive force, you’re not making it about racial profiling?” he gave a clear, “No.”
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton moved quickly — apologizing to Blake publicly (and later personally) and making it plain in remarks at One Police Plaza that “race had nothing at all to do with this.”
As well as putting Officer James Frascatore on modified duty pending an Internal Affairs probe.
The Blake case has also been added to Frascatore’s Civilian Complaint Review Board docket, which already included at least five charges of excessive force in four years — more than the overwhelming majority of cops rack up in their entire careers.
We expect Bratton will be asking tough questions about why that hadn’t raised red flags within the department. The NYPD remains the most professional police force in the nation: It’s spent the last two decades not only bringing crime rates crashing down, but also drastically reducing its own use of force, armed and unarmed.
The professional cop-bashers and other opportunists will try to use this affair to impugn every one of the department’s 35,000 officers. It’s up to Bratton and his boss, the mayor, to make sure that effort fails.
Happily, it seems James Blake — who says “I do think most cops are doing a great job keeping us safe” — will be on their side.