There are many ways to rip up a page of the social contract. Actions like Bernie Goetz’s are just one of them. One of the most egregious comes when the part of the contract ripped up is that between police and citizens—which is to keep society safe for democracy, and citizens safe in traffic. It was ripped up by police once in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention and then it was very public—but now it was happening in New York, hidden inside housing projects and the grimy concrete holding cells of run-down police stations.
The Stun Gun case is a great example of how you can both do immediate harm, then harm the fabric of a city by breaking faith with the population and especially one large segment of it. The events leading up to it occur on a Wednesday night in 1985 when a young Black man and a young Black woman were seen talking on a corner in South Ozone Park and six white cops jumped out from an unmarked station wagon and came right at them. One in plainclothes. Five in uniforms. The allegation is that one of the young people was holding a marked $10 bill handed over by an undercover for the purchase of ten dollars’ worth of marijuana. They were searched on the spot. First the young man. No such bill was found. Then the young woman. No such bill was found. Then the young woman again.
And that is where it begins at around 10 P.M. on Wednesday, April 17, 1985.
It is just under six months after an emotionally troubled, heavyset Black woman is killed inside her Bronx public housing apartment on October 29, 1984, with two blasts from a 12 gauge police shotgun. The allegation was that she was a danger to police. The police union highlighted this in ads that did little to defuse public anger.
It is a little over a year and a half after a graffiti artist named Michael Stewart dies on September 28, 1983, from what medical authorities deem strangulation while in police custody. There were no allegations that overcome the wail, “Oh my god, help me,” that witnesses say they heard as a hogtied Michael Stewart struggled for life.
The steady, seemingly institutionalized tempo of apparent police brutality is now, with Breslin’s sensational exposé, at a crescendo. The failure of police leadership is now in the spotlight.
As Mark Davidson and Denise Memminger talked last Wednesday, a gray station wagon pulled up and, as both recall, six policemen jumped out, five in uniform and one in plainclothes. All were white.
They searched Davidson for a marked $10 bill that they said had been given to him 10 minutes before by an undercover cop making a pot buy. Davidson insisted that they had the wrong person. He only had 26 cents in his pocket. . . .
What six policemen were doing out on an alleged $10 pot buy is one small question. How six policemen could be involved in the sale and then manage to miss making the arrest on the spot is another. These points are quite small, however, compared to the charges about what happened next.
The young woman was sent home. Mark Davidson says he was taken to the 106th Precinct. . . .
Davidson said the tall man, who appeared to be in charge, took him into a room where, the teenager says, he then was punched in the right eye. Davidson had been to an eye doctor earlier that day for an examination and the doctor now certifies that there was no mark around either eye. Davidson then says that the tall man slammed his head into the wall twice. He says that the tall man then left the room and reappeared in street clothes and with a can of Budweiser beer. Davidson said the tall man again demanded to know about the $10. . . . when he did not answer, the man put something on his back which gave him an electric shock. He says that he yelled as loudly as he could when he was shocked.
Davidson says he turned around and saw the tall man holding something that was black and fit in his hand and had two metal prongs about six inches long. The man then started to apply the prongs to Davidson’s body, front and back, and sent shocks through him repeatedly. Davidson yelled. He says no other policeman entered the room to see what was causing the yelling.
Davidson says that he believes the shocks went on for about 20 minutes. He says he yelled loud enough for anybody in the police station to hear him. He says that he asked to call his mother. The tall man with the instrument shocking his body refused his request, saying that they were not part of a television program. Davidson says the cop threatened to put the shock apparatus to his testicles. At that point, Davidson says, he made up the story about spending the $10 in a store. Davidson says that he made this up in order to get the cop to stop torturing him.
The young man was taken to be booked at about 10 P.M. He was held until Thursday and a 7 P.M. court appearance.
There were twenty-two burns on the front of his body, twenty on the back. These were in sets of two as would be the case from a two-pronged prod capable, according to Breslin, of sometimes releasing up to 50,000 volts. And there was more: the electricity was also applied to his buttocks. In court, at the request of a prosecutor, the burns were videotaped. Though no one doubted the burns, there would now be an investigation into the cause, the torturer, and any accomplices. Afterward, in his office, his lawyer, Marvyn Kornberg, part of the defense bar aristocracy of Queens Boulevard and the criminal courts there, had Davidson hold up his shirt. The photographs were graphic. The burn marks ugly. Decades later they are still able to shock and disgust.
This was the start of the reporting. The New York Times picked up the trail the next day, and Breslin stayed on it, unrelenting in documenting each step of the aftermath.
By the end of the week, four police officers had been arrested, the Mayor of New York held a press conference to say the case “shocks the conscience,” and the Police Department transferred the entire top command of the precinct. Queens District Attorney John Santucci told the media that his assistant who viewed the burns said they looked like fried flesh. Breslin returned to the precinct, the 106th (pronounced One Oh Six), and closed his first column by circling back to the tall man’s offhandedly cruel remark about television drama as opposed to what happens in the real world.
Yesterday in Ozone Park, on a lamppost in front of the 106th, there was a sign for a nonexistent cross-street. Hill St., the sign said. On any other day, this would have brought a smile. Seeing the sign in the gray morning yesterday only heightened the impression that the real police and those on television get confused in the minds of both public and police.
On the 23rd, Breslin’s column takes us back to Queens and back to “Marvyn with a Y, Kornberg with a K,” as the lawyer liked to remind reporters (and likely did at the press conference or afterward).
Somebody in the office asked him, “How clear did you see the faces of the cops?”
Kornberg interrupted. “That’s for a court of law.”
“How many times did you ask them to stop?” Davidson was asked.
“I’m not sure. It was a lot.”
The questions were being asked by reporters, who leaned against office walls. Now photographers came in and Davidson was asked to stand up and show the burn marks. He stood and took off his shirt. A big strong handsome kid with these evenly spaced burn marks across his stomach and back. Forty two of them.
“You’re a big kid. How did they hold you down?” he was asked.
“I was handcuffed behind the back.”
The press conference ended soon after this because Kornberg and his 18-year-old client had an appointment at the District Attorney’s office.
Inside, he would go over the photos of New York City policemen and try to pick out two who were torturers.
It was five o’clock by now, and from the regular offices of Borough Hall, from the sewer department and the real estate taxation offices, women streamed out and headed home.
One group, seeing the crowd following Davidson, stopped and watched.
“I know who that is,” one woman, a burly blond, said. “That’s the guy that the cops beat up.”
“They didn’t beat him up, they charged him up with electricity,” the one next to her said.
“Could you imagine that?” the blond said. “Whoever heard of a thing like that?”
“And in Queens,” her friend said.
Upstairs, Davidson sat at a table and was shown a card on which were eight new color photos of policemen. He looked and immediately pointed at the second picture on the card.
“He put the machine on me,” Davidson said. “I don’t have to look at anybody else.”
He then was shown a second sheet of photos. The finger went to one picture immediately.
An officer from the Internal Affairs Division then pulled out an envelope, vouchered by the property clerk—obviously the result of a search—and took from the envelope a small black electrical device. The device had light fingerprint dust on it. The Internal Affairs officer asked Davidson if he had seen the device before.
“I can’t tell you, because I was in pain,” Davidson said. “But that looks like it.”
And now that a youth facing charges of selling a $10 bag of marijuana was no longer to be on trial, the city of New York and its police would be suspected of being capable of torture.
Then Mark Davidson walked out into a wet Queens night and went home. He had to get up for school in the morning.
And Breslin continued to keep the case under a strong spotlight. At the beginning of May, just over a week after the first column, he explained:
Kornberg stared at the burn marks and left Davidson and went downstairs and found an assistant district attorney, David Everett. He told Everett what he had just seen. Everett said that it should be reported to the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division. Everett called from the courthouse and was told by the division that this was a matter for the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Everett then called a special field Internal Affairs unit. The answer was the same. . . . Everett decided that the district attorney’s office would look into the case without the help of police. As Queens District Attorney John Santucci was born in the 106th Precinct, attended school there, represented it in the state Legislature and still lives there, only a few blocks from the stationhouse, there was no question about how intensive the investigation would be. There also was another dimension: If a case of this magnitude, occurring in his own neighborhood, ever got by Santucci, his present job—a very good job for a guy from Ozone Park—soon would be a memory. His future would be gone. Santucci, who likes both job today and promising future, had flames coming out of the sidewalks in front of the 106th. Here was a department which allegedly was responsible for an 18-year-old Black youth, handcuffed behind his back, being tortured with an electrical device by at least two white cops, with others present, in a precinct in Queens and would not even take a phone call of complaint about it.
In Queens, once so many were raised as the children of policemen, perhaps as many as five members of the Police Department of the City of New York could be under indictment on charges spreading from the alleged torturing with electricity of a helpless and handcuffed teenager in the 106th Precinct in Ozone Park.
Always in New York, a police scandal meant payoffs from bookmakers, prostitutes or the narcotics traffic. Commissions were established. Prosecutors had great careers and there was always a sort of hero cop who came forward with assorted tales which enchanted movie producers. But through the Gross bookmaking scandal and Serpico and the Knapp Commission, the problem was only over money.
Those policemen expected to be dragged into court in Queens would be there on charges of torturing citizens, an act usually associated with another century or continent. None of the policemen lives in this city. But they have made us all lousy.
Even looking at the event through a rearview mirror filled with other ugly incidents involving police officers, even in the aftermath of the sick and sickening August 1997 anal assault with a police nightstick on Abner Louima, this torture by electric shock of a handcuffed 18-year-old stands out simply because it is the kind of thing seen in dictatorships somewhere else.
Even after the July 17, 2014, death of Eric Garner in police custody when an outlawed chokehold was used to strangle his breathing.
Even after the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd by a policeman who pressed and held his knee onto a Black man’s neck with no apparent sense of history, irony, or humanity.
Even after all these atrocities this burning of a young man’s flesh, which happened inside a police precinct where dozens would have been on duty, stands out. In the aftermath the highest rank available to talk was a sergeant. The Police Commissioner was in San Francisco, junketeering. Even after these and the local and national and international protests we have seen, the attack on Mark Davidson remains high in the pantheon of deranged abuse of the only official power that matters on the street: the power of police. Because, on the street, the highest ranking government official you are likely to see is a police officer. Perhaps even a sergeant.