L
Patrick Hendry, the brand new head of New York Metropolis’s law enforcement officials’ union, has a lot in widespread together with his predecessor: Their moms are from Eire. They grew up in Queens, the sons of union males. They usually consider a police union should defend officers, even these accused of wrongdoing.
Mr. Hendry and Patrick J. Lynch, the previous president of the Police Benevolent Affiliation, say officers should make split-second choices that carry uniquely excessive stakes for union members, for town and throughout the 50,500-employee Police Division — the nation’s largest.
For practically 1 / 4 century, the booming voice of Mr. Lynch, who stepped down June 30, made the union a key participant in New York politics. He was a take-it-or-leave-it megaphone for 21,000 lively members. He battled Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani over wage freezes; accused Mayor Bill de Blasio after the assassination of two officers of stirring up anti-police sentiment; and led the union when it endorsed Donald J. Trump for president in 2020.
Now Mr. Hendry, 51, who’s untested as a public determine, should determine whether or not he’ll deviate from that path. He says that his plans are easy: Get extra officers longer shifts in trade for extra days off, fend off watchdogs who he says search to self-discipline officers over minor complaints and construct on the varied staff he has assembled to serve a youthful, majority-minority pressure.
He additionally desires to retain officers being wooed by other law enforcement agencies providing extra money and fewer big-city stress. Because of a union contract signed in April, officers beginning subsequent yr will earn about $56,000 yearly of their first yr and simply over $65,000 by their fifth yr — far decrease than elsewhere within the nation.
“Our members are nonetheless leaving. We’re understaffed and overworked. We made progress on the contract, however we nonetheless consider we’re underpaid,” Mr. Hendry mentioned throughout a current interview at Police Benevolent Affiliation headquarters in Decrease Manhattan. “We’re the largest pressure within the nation, and we must be paid the best within the nation.”
Mr. Hendry himself is anticipated to earn about $218,000 yearly, half from his police wage and half from the union; union leaders are excused from metropolis work with a view to carry out union enterprise full time.
He was fast to take up his ceremonial duties. On Wednesday, he went to the northeast facet of Central Park the place, in 1986, a 15-year-old boy shot Detective Steven McDonald. In 2019, the detective, who had forgiven the boy who left him paralyzed, died from his accidents.
Mr. Hendry gave a brief speech earlier than a small group gathered there, 37 years to the day of the capturing. “Everybody right here has a Steven McDonald story,” he mentioned. “These tales made us higher law enforcement officials, made us higher folks.” After he completed, he embraced Detective McDonald’s widow and son.
The timing of Mr. Hendry’s ascension coincides with a turning level for the Police Division. Edward Caban was named acting commissioner this month after the abrupt resignation of Keechant Sewell. Ms. Sewell, Mr. Lynch and town negotiated a long-awaited contract that provides officers’ higher pay and schedule flexibility, work that Mr. Hendry desires to proceed with Mr. Caban, who’s the son of a transit cop from the Bronx.
Mr. Hendry, the son of a carpenter and waitress who immigrated from Eire, grew up in Queens Village, the youngest of 4 kids. He was an Eagle Scout and an altar boy at a Roman Catholic parish earlier than he joined the division in 1993 at age 21. 9 years later, whereas working on the 103rd Precinct in Queens, he grew to become a union delegate.
Again then, Mr. Lynch was a brand new chief who rapidly made the Police Benevolent Affiliation a strong voice within the metropolis and on the nationwide stage.
Mr. Lynch gave voice to law enforcement officials’ anger following a two-year wage freeze in the course of the Giuliani administration, with officers protesting from precincts to the State Capitol. The union made an unsuccessful attraction of a 2013 ruling that ended the division’s use of stop-and-frisk — a police tactic defended by mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that unfairly focused Black and brown males.
In 2014, after Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who was incensed over killings by the police, shot two officers useless, Mr. Lynch solid blame on Mr. de Blasio. At Woodhull Hospital in Queens that night time, Mr. Lynch mentioned, “There’s blood on many palms” and added: “That blood on the palms begins on the steps of Metropolis Corridor, within the workplace of the mayor.” Days later, on the funeral of one of many slain officers, law enforcement officials turned their backs on the mayor as he spoke.
Six years later, Mr. Lynch was once more at warfare with Mr. de Blasio as racial-justice protests and calls to defund the police swept the nation. The union endorsed Mr. Trump, placing Mr. Lynch within the nationwide highlight.
Mr. Lynch appeared to have a greater rapport with Mayor Eric Adams, a former officer who agreed to the more generous contract, and who has mentioned he sees the police as an extension of himself.
Mr. Lynch, 59, didn’t need to attempt for a brand new five-year time period as a result of he would have reached the necessary retirement age for a police officer earlier than the time period ended. When he introduced he wouldn’t search re-election, Jumaane Williams, town’s public advocate, mentioned in a telephone interview that his departure was lengthy overdue, calling him the “most obstructive voice to having an actual dialog round public security.”
“I don’t suppose he was ever curious about doing something that was about addressing accountability and transparency in policing,” he mentioned.
“It’s a must to communicate up in your members, be it working circumstances, pay, safety in opposition to undo self-discipline,” he added. “However he spoke for them as loud as doable, even once they have been fallacious.”
Mr. Hendry has already made strikes that mirror the trendy make-up of the division, whose uniformed work force is now 58 percent nonwhite. He has chosen two girls of shade to be among the many union’s prime six leaders. One, Betty Carradero, who’s Latina, would be the union secretary; the opposite, Lethimyle Cleveland, who’s Black and Vietnamese, would be the first brazenly homosexual board member. Though a lot of the group’s 369 delegates are white, 40 % are actually folks of shade.
“I’ve put a staff collectively that actually displays our members,” Mr. Hendry mentioned.
Nonetheless, adjustments in management would possibly make little distinction within the public notion of a Police Division with a historical past of high-profile killings of Black and brown New Yorkers, mentioned Lee Adler, a labor research professor at Cornell College and an professional in regulation enforcement unions.
When federal prosecutors declined to charge an officer who fatally shot Ramarley Graham, an unarmed Black teenager, within the rest room of his Bronx house in 2012, Mr. Lynch mentioned there was a “scourge of weapons and medicines in the neighborhood” and that the officer’s “good religion effort to fight these ills introduced us to this tragedy.” After the firing of the officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death in 2014, Mr. Lynch mentioned his members ought to “proceed with the utmost warning on this new actuality, through which they might be deemed ‘reckless’ only for doing their job.”
Union leaders have been pushed “to defend, clarify and rationalize” dangerous actors, Professor Adler mentioned. “They could have non-public moments the place their conscience rings as clear as a bell. However these ideas don’t change into a part of their very own working methods from which they make choices — even when it’s actual, and even when it’s highly effective, and even when it appears proper.”
To that, Mr. Lynch asks: If Mr. Hendry and the union don’t stand behind law enforcement officials, whose each transfer is topic to intense scrutiny by the Police Division, politicians and the general public, who will?
“Generally the opposite facet is simply fallacious, and somebody has to inform them. It’s not all the time snug, however that’s the job,” Mr. Lynch mentioned.
“The way you get there might differ with time. It might differ with the difficulty.” And, Mr. Lynch added: “It might differ with the particular person in cost.”
