What the NYC Police Department Learned Me

DENNIS KYNE / MyTown.ca 19may2005

[More on Dennis Kyne]

On April 25th, 2005, Representative John Conyers (D-MI), the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee signed onto a letter to The Honorable Alberto Gonzalez, the Attorney General for the United States of America. Also signed by Jerrold Nadler (NY), Robert C. Scott (VA), Melvin Watt (NC), Sheila Jackson Lee (TX), and Linda Sanchez (CA), the letter asks our Attorney General for immediate federal scrutiny into criminal deprivations of rights under color of law (18 U.S.C. 242) and civil violations of the police pattern and practice laws (42 U.S.C. 14141).

This letter does not mention me by name, but it is based on my experience with the 7th largest military in the world, the New York City Police Department. I was arrested in New York during the massive sweeps of the RNC in August of 2004 and maliciously prosecuted until December of 2004. The day of my arrest, I had watched police shove young women, imprison 16-year-old boys with adults, and arrest Chinese food delivery people when the only qualification for detention was being on a bike while the critical mass protestors rode by. It was Martial Law, absolutely not what I almost died in combat for. If Red Lynx Productions hadn’t been documenting the event I might be in jail. If my attorney, Lewis B. Oliver, Jr., hadn’t handed officer Matthew Wohl his lunch on the stand I might not feel redeemed. For two and a half hours Mr. Oliver asked Mr. Wohl repeatedly where he was standing, what he was looking at and how I behaved before he supposedly arrested me.

Wohl stated I appeared to be a crazy veteran. His description of my behavior was so far from reality that it drew tears from my eyes. Literally, I was crying in the courtroom and knew that America was in rotten shape. I have taken a vow of nonviolence and am insulted that because I am a combat veteran people assume I must be violent. This is the stigma we veterans live with for our entire post combat lives, it is not only unfair, as most know, it is also untrue. I fight for equality and justice, and most of all for truth. I don’t have to lie or be violent about it either.

Everyone knows soldiers don’t cry though. So, after having been in combat, damn near killed in action, and thinking I had done it so that citizens of the United States could congregate peacefully and assemble in protest, I got myself together, put my head and eyes to the front, and listened to an officer, with three years on the police force, lie under oath for two and a half hours. He did not say one word of truth about the events of August 29th the entire time he was questioned, not one. He spoke of carrying me across the street with three other officers. He claimed I was kicking and screaming all the way to the paddy wagon. He told a jury that I had been resisting arrest, incited a riot, obstructed a government operation and was guilty of committing four counts of disorderly conduct. The judge was tiring of the examination, and the day was coming to a close when Mr. Oliver finally let Wohl climb off the stand.

Then Gideon Oliver handed over the video, the one Red Lynx Productions had provided the defense, to the District Attorney’s office. It was clear from the video that Matthew Wohl was nowhere near the event, nowhere near me, and nowhere near the four other individuals he was credited with arresting that day.

Five people were taken to Guantanamo on the Hudson, touristically referred to as Pier 57, on the word of Matthew Wohl. We watched as people became unhealthy in a bus terminal (Pier 57's use before it became a holding facility for the justice-seeking citizens the Republicans didn’t want anyone to see) loaded with grease, heavy metal particles and asbestos. We sat in barbed wire cages with concertina wire laced at the top of it. We had to beg to use the bathroom and we were fed cheese on bread. The whole time Wohl sat with his fellow cops, smoking cigarettes and smiling about the day’s work they had done. Sometime after midnight they loaded us up in a van and bussed us over to the fingerprinting station.

My four new friends and I spent the day together traveling the intake facility of the Manhattan Detention Center, and ended up in night court. While most protestors were sent out with a date to return, I was slammed. Bail of seven hundred dollars had been requested by the D.A, and reduced by the judge to five hundred. This may not sound like a lot, and that is the problem when you are an out-of-towner. You actually want it to be a lot. Why? Because no bail bondsmen in NYC is coming to get you out of jail for a 10% fee which turns out to be fifty dollars. I had the Legal Aid Society Lawyer tell me I would be able to use my credit card, and I had an officer of the court tell me, “She knows damn well you can’t use your credit card.” So much for everyone being on the same sheet of music at the courthouse.

As I sat in a dirty old box, an officer leaned his head in and said I better start using the phone, “it isn’t real nice on the other side for you white guys.”

Surely his job wasn’t to make me comfortable, but here he was instilling fear of color in an out-of-towner. I grew up in San Jose, California where Tommy Smith and John Carlos were my heroes. These guys had shoved their black gloved fists in the air at the ‘68 Olympics and told the world they were tired of the racism in America. I graduated from the same college as Smith and Carlos and I don’t acknowledge this type of bull. But, sadly enough, I was afraid. I dialed the number of a lady who handed me her business card earlier in the day, she said she was broke. I called my Mother, in California, and she said she would get to work on it.

I got naked, jumped into a cold shower, and then was escorted to the Dr.’s office where they drew blood and took a TB test. By this point, it was real clear where I was and where I was going. I had not been near a white person since the courtroom. I was on my way to “The Tombs.” I had read about this place--heck, Bob Dylan wrote a song about this place. All the cells were locked and everyone was asleep when I checked in. When I awoke, the first thing I went for was the phone.

Along one wall was a bank of phones. However, phones in The Tombs require a password, and I didn’t have one. So, a fellow from South Bronx, helped me out and let me use his. He didn’t mind I was white, matter of fact most of the inmates said they appreciated the work of the protesters, who, as most television viewers will note were mostly white.

I got Mom on the line and she said, “Hang tough, I won’t go to work until I know someone is on the way with the money.”

As we hung in the common area during a brief release from our cells watching the protestors on the news, a friend from Harlem said, “I don’t know what the hell you all are doing out there, but I am all for it. You all are standing for something and that is cool.”

I felt like writing a letter as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote from the Birmingham jail. “Tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brother hood,” King wrote. What better place for a white antiwar dude than a prison filled with black men to experience his own personal tension and prove that the depths of prejudice must be broken in order for us to gain ground on the real enemy? The war was apparent, the choice to either enslave the citizenry or enlighten them had already been made. In America, they were choosing to enslave people......still.

I had the opportunity to lunch with an incarcerated attorney, who welcomed me to his table and told me, “You feel free to talk to anyone on this block you want to. We all know what you are doing out there and you won’t have any trouble in here.” As we spoke of our life experiences he mentioned something that will sit with me forever. “A lot of the liberals in New York City are more racist than the Conservatives,” was the sentence that will resound in my head until the day I die.

This lawyer had explained to me that the prison system of New York City functioned as the machine by which blacks and Dominicans are held down and denied rights guaranteed by the Constitution. I was getting a lesson, I was enjoying my education. I was understanding what the prison system is, I was finding an answer to why I had been slammed. I wasn’t falling in love with the place. However, I was falling in love with the people. These men lived in a city that, as the Global Black News (GBN) reports in March of 2004, has a 50% black male unemployment rate. Some of the fellows asked me about my life, and told me about theirs.

I was sick from the asbestos at Guantanamo on the Hudson. I knew I had a urinary tract infection, and I had blood in my stool. I had to get out of this rat hole before I needed to see another one of those medical type who had been sticking needles of who knows what in my arm during intake procedures.

Someone I didn’t know posted my bail. Happened to be a friend of the brother of the guy who lives next door to my mother. How about that for long-distance assist. My mother had wired the money east and he got to the bail station and got me released.

On December 14th, two days before Wohl lied to the court, I walked into Gerald Lewis’s courthouse dressed in my United States Army “dress blues.” The District Attorney argued a motion saying I should not be allowed to wear it. After fifteen years of service and multiple honorable discharges, a kid who was in Junior High when I was on the battlefield was telling the court I was not entitled to wear my Blues. But Judge Lewis granted his motion and we began drawing a jury.

The 28-person jury pool did not have one black male in it. Imagine that, I spent my time in prison with almost all black males. New York has a fifty percent unemployment rate for black males. Not one jury pool member was a black male. So, this means not only was there no black males on my jury, there wasn’t even one black male in the jury pool to select from. I was in disbelief. I leaned over and asked Gideon if I could mention this to the Judge, he smiled, said he didn’t think that would be appropriate.

I wanted to cry, I knew what the attorney had told me was true, the system is meant to keep blacks and Dominicans in a state of enslavement.....still.

I am hoping that the letter sent from the minority member of Congress, to Alberto Gonzales, one of this administration’s token minority appointees, hits him in the heart. This addresses the pulse of the problem. White guys like Wohl take the stand and lie about white guys like me. What the hell do you think he is saying about the brothers in South Bronx which is where he does his regular shifts?

Everyone knows a soldier doesn’t cry. So.... I will continue to tell the story of the men locked up in Manhattan, their plight is much worse than mine. I stayed with an oppressed majority in “The Tombs” and I was reminded of what I learned on the battlefield, we are all in this together

After 15 years in the US Army, Dennis Kyne knows the story of war. He spent over a year on the front lines of Gulf War I as a battlefield medic. He learned the hard way how to Support the Truth. Dennis was trained extensively by the US Army - as a battlefield medic, as a Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons specialist, as a drill sergeant, and was eventually nominated to study at the US Military Academy at West Point. In 1991 he was sent to Iraq as a part of Gulf War I - Operation Desert Storm, where he worked as a medic, pulling his comrades from battle and treating the wounds of an army of Americans sent to fight a war on foreign soil.

After an honorable discharge in 2003, Dennis devoted his life to Support the Truth. Today Dennis travels the country describing his first-hand military experience, and educating young Americans about the ill effects of Depleted Uranium.

source: http://mytown.ca/denniskyne/ 20may2005