That famous question about “who watches the watchmen” usually gets asked about police and public authorities but it comes from the brilliant, bitter Roman poet Juvenal, whose “Satires” chastised his decadent society.
He posed the question about the servants tasked with guarding the “virtue,” as it were, of wives, in a screed against marriage and “all the houses where men live and entertain who embrace / Obscenity, and whose fidgeting right hands stop at nothing”:
I know the warnings and advice that all my old friends offer:
“Lock the door, and keep her close.” But who is to guard the
Guardians themselves, when they win a prize for secrecy re
The lewd girl’s affairs? In crime, complicity guarantees silence.
Speaking of depraved men with fidgeting hands but getting back to police and the present, NYPD Chief of Department Jeff Maddrey appears to have finally wriggled off the hook on the latest charges against him for abusing his potent public authority.
Maddrey ascended to his role as the NYPD’s top uniformed official in the first year of the Adams administration, a few years after he was docked 45 vacation days for ordering responding officers to go away as the then-Patrol Borough Brooklyn North commander was allegedly roughing up a former cop who then pulled on a gun on him and who says they’d had a long-term affair.
(The married father of three, who’s denied her claims, told the Daily News after the police commissioner at the time slapped him with that punishment that “The girl railroaded me” and “I took the harsh penalty after being victimized by her when I was just protecting her and her kids by not having her arrested.”)
His ascent to chief of department also came a year after the newsroom The City reported that he’d intervened as the then-community affairs bureau chief to almost immediately void the arrest of an ex-cop who chased three kids — aged 12, 13 and 14 — while allegedly menacing them with his gun.
Promoting him in spite of an ongoing investigation into that alleged abuse spoke to the mayor’s loyalty to his crew and to “white shirt immunity,” where the NYPD’s made men aren’t held to the same standards as the officers they command.
Keechant Sewell, Adams’ first police commissioner, reportedly resigned in part because she was unwilling to submit to pressure from the mayor himself not to impose any discipline on Maddrey.
But now a departmental judge has written that the Civilian Complaint Review Board had no standing to prosecute Maddrey for his actions, since he didn’t engage with civilians but only police officers when he showed up at the precinct to free the ex-cop who used to work for him.
That’s a corruption-related issue for Internal Affairs, wrote Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemarie Maldonado.
Her decision comes suspiciously late in the process, after the police already conducted their own investigations that somehow found that only one person had done anything wrong here. That was the sergeant who initially arrested the ex-cop, according to internal documents attached to the decision that also ding the kids for apparently minor inconsistencies in their accounts.
It doesn’t pass the smell test.
The Adams administration has a NYPD chief of department who keeps getting accused of abusing his authority, including with women.
A deputy mayor for public safety, Phil Banks, who was appointed to that role a decade after he abruptly resigned from the NYPD amid a FBI investigation and who apologized on his return for his ties to men he traveled the world with and who eventually went to prison for trying to bribe a mayor and providing prostitutes to other officers.
And another ex-cop and old friend of Eric Adams, Tim Pearson, who’s running a shadowy new agency and is being sued for allegedly harassing a female police officer who worked for him into leaving the department — with the city paying for his defense at the mayor’s behest and the city’s chief attorney, Sylvia Radix-Hines, reportedly getting pushed out in part because she objected to doing that.
None of that is normal, or good.
Another phrase coined by Juvenal is a “black swan,” which he used to describe the impossibility of finding a “lovely, gracious, rich, and fertile” wife but now refers to rare and surprising events that defy expectations and actuaries.
Police chiefs and mayors concerned with maintaining public confidence, instead of acting as a group of guys to close ranks and protect their own, shouldn’t be black swans.
Something for New Yorkers to keep in mind while watching their watchmen ahead of next year’s city elections.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
