THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Monday, March 29, 2021
THE LAWLESS COP CLASS AND THE LAWLESS LAWYER CLASS - BOTH ARE SUBSTANTIALLY NOTHING MORE THAN PARASITES ON SOCIETY
“The Ball Was Dropped by All”: How Cops Got More Than $400,000 in Unlawful Sick Day Payouts
Records in 25 New Jersey towns show that police officers took annual payments for unused sick days despite a law forbidding the practice. The payments add up to nearly half a million dollars from 2017 through 2019. The cops may have to pay it back.
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This story was co-published with the Asbury Park Press, which was a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network in 2020.
In 2010, New Jersey lawmakers wanted to put a stop to the six-figure payouts police officers and other public employees could get by cashing in their unused sick days at retirement. They capped the sellbacks at $15,000 for anyone hired after the law took effect.
Six years later, Vernon Township, a small town in northern New Jersey, changed its police contract to allow officers to cash in their sick days annually, in addition to at retirement. Over the years 2017 and 2018, officers hired after the 2010 law took effect were paid more than $13,000, according to town payroll records.
Vernon is one of 25 towns identified by the Asbury Park Press and ProPublica as having made payments for unused sick time to officers covered by the 2010 law, totaling more than $460,000 between 2017 and 2019. Now, New Jersey’s acting state comptroller has deemed those types of payments illegal. In some cases, the officers might need to pay that money back.
In a report issued this month, Comptroller Kevin Walsh highlighted improper sick time sellbacks by public employees in Palisades Park, a Bergen County town across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Any sick time sellback payments other than a retirement check capped at $15,000 are unlawful, the report said. The town’s attorney, John Schettino, said police officers are not among those who received payouts for sick days. He said the town is working to get money back from employees who shouldn’t have received it and is changing its contracts to comply with the law.
Credit:Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica
A Police Union Contract Puts Taxpayers on the Hook to Defend Officers When the City Won’t
A little-known labor contract provision obligates New Yorkers to help pay officers’ legal bills in lawsuits that city lawyers won’t defend.
Even among the hundreds of videos capturing the violent police response to Black Lives Matter protests last year, this one stood out.
A muscular male officer, in a navy blue shirt with “NYPD” across the back, lunged at a young demonstrator, shoving her several feet and sending her crashing to the ground on a street in Brooklyn.
In a video shot by a reporter and shared widely on social media, the woman, Dounya Zayer, can be seen clutching her head and writhing in pain after she tumbles to the asphalt.
The mayor called the officer’s actions “absolutely unacceptable,” the police commissioner said internal affairs was investigating and, 11 days after the incident, the district attorney announced criminal charges against the officer, Vincent D’Andraia.
Zayer, 21, went on to file a lawsuit alleging that D’Andraia had violated her right to free speech, and last month, the city’s Law Department, which almost always represents officers sued for on-the-job actions, told D’Andraia it wouldn’t defend him in court.
It looked like the city was cutting the cop loose, a step rarely taken in the hundreds of lawsuits filed every year against NYPD officers. But while a city lawyer won’t be representing D’Andraia in court, it turns out New Yorkers are still paying the law firm that is representing him in the case.
That’s because every year, the city treasury effectively bankrolls a union-controlled legal defense fund for officers. The little-known fund is financed in part by a direct city contribution of nearly $2 million a year that is expressly intended to pay for lawyers in civil cases like D’Andraia’s, where the Law Department has decided an officer’s conduct is essentially indefensible. Or, as the police union’s legal plan puts it, “when the City of New York fails or otherwise refuses to provide a legal defense.”
The money isn’t supposed to be used by the union, the Police Benevolent Association, “in any action directly or indirectly adverse to the interests of the City,” according to a 1985 letter memorializing the deal that established the annual taxpayer contribution. But the agreement doesn’t define those “interests,” and the city is typically a co-defendant in such cases, as it is in the lawsuit by Zayer. So even as the city might distance itself from an officer, it could still argue that the government’s legal interests are best served by its employee having robust legal representation.
“It’s not bad public policy to invest and make sure that all sides have adequate representation,” said Zachary Carter, who ran the Law Department from 2014 to 2019.
But critics say that subsidizing such defenses could undercut police accountability by sending a message to officers that the city will back them no matter what.
“The bottom line is this is scandalous,” said Joel Berger, a lawyer who specializes in police abuse cases and who, in the 1990s, served as a senior official in the Law Department who decided when the city should withdraw representation of officers. “It was a sweetheart deal with the union and it should never have been agreed to.”
Neither the mayor’s office nor the Law Department would address detailed questions from ProPublica about the fund, including how the city squares paying for the defense of officers it won’t represent with the provision stipulating that the money not be used for any purpose “adverse to the interests of the City.”
The Legal Services Fund of the Police Benevolent Association has in recent years paid for the representation of an NYPD officer accused in a lawsuit of slamming a 75-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease against the hood of a car after the man talked back to the cop, and has paid to defend another officer who court papers charge tackled an unarmed, chronically ill, 4-foot-8-inch, 85-pound man and shocked him with a stun gun.
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