People can disagree about who’s at fault for what as they watch the infamous video of the motorcycles vs. the Range Rover on the West Side Highway. But everyone seems to be asking the same question: Where were the cops?
Forget that if you make a turn off a thru-street or go a little fast on the FDR you’ll probably be pursued by a ticket-wielding officer.
And yet somehow a pack of 30 motorcycles managed to chase an SUV for block after block – despite four 911 calls from the car in eight minutes.
It turns out that the NYPD actually has an official policy for dealing with these biker groups: Ignore them.
OK, it’s only “ignore them on the road,” for fear a chase will cause a fatal accident to innocent pedestrians. And the police did arrest dozens of bikers, and confiscate motorcycles, near Times Square, where the group had meant to rally that day.
Still . . .
Add to that the astounding news that the biker pack included at least two, and possibly as many as five, police officers — one of whom apparently joined in the attack on the car.
Why wouldn’t a member of the NYPD, even off-duty or undercover, defuse the terrible situation playing out on our streets?
This incident comes at the heels of another troubling NYPD story — a judge’s ruling in the case of Joseph Lozito.
Last year, crazed murderer Maksim Gelman was terrorizing our city. He entered a subway car, where he lunged at bystander Lozito with a knife, stabbing him several times before Lozito managed to disarm him. The real shocker: Two police officers in the subway operator’s cab did nothing to subdue Gelman or stop the attack on Lozito.
In July, a judge ruled that Lozito can’t sue the city because the cops looked the other way — even though the officers knew Gelman was on the train, on the run after a murder-spree that spanned several boroughs.
The city argued that the officers had “no special duty” to protect Lozito — and the judge agreed, noting “no direct promises of protection were made to Lozito.”
Isn’t the promise of protection the whole point of a police force? Surely we allow ourselves to be a disarmed city, with a strong “stop and frisk” program, specifically for that promise of protection.
If it isn’t police officers’ job to step in when someone is being physically assaulted in front of them, then what, exactly, is their job?
Karol Markowicz blogs at alarmingnews.com.