Women's Rights and Law Enforcement Responsibilities

Been occupied and preoccupied.  Now living with wife's sister and brother-in-law, doing my daily routine (which is different each day).  Not much out of the ordinary to report, other than, as mentioned in prior postings, my current station in life is anything but ordinary.

A memorial tribute to Deputy Chief Gertrude Schimmel is now in order.

There are womens' rights advocates, and then, there are the real womens' rights advocates.  One staunch advocate for women's rights who understood that rights need to be balanced by responsibilities was Gertrude Tannenbaum Schimmel, the first female to attain the rank of Sergeant in the New York Police Department.  Gertrude graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hunter College, and retired from the NYPD at the rank of Deputy Chief, raising two sons in the process.

Apparently not a flaming feminazi; just one tough Jewish girl from the Bronx.

Gertrude Schimmel died yesterday at the age of 96.

RIP, Gertrude Schimmel.

Predictive Analysis: A Rose by Another Name

Newsday has an "exclusive" in today's print edition [the Newsday website has a paywall and lots of flash player apps that crash browsers; this link is safer.]:  "New Way to Fight Crime," "LI Cops credit data-driven approach as key to historic drop."

Seems that the police in Nassau County and Suffolk County are using a statistical technique known as "predictive analysis" as an aid in their police work, and are quite pleased with the results.  So is this Long Island resident.  I applaud the law enforcement agencies in their very honorable achievements, and would be pleased to no end to see crime drop even further.

But, pray tell, what happens if the "predictive analysis" techniques cause the law enforcement officers to focus upon individuals who belong to social and ethnic groups which the liberals have labeled as downtrodden and disadvantaged, and which have accordingly been adopted by the liberals as surrogate victims for whom their hearts can hemorrhage a few pints of blood?  Wouldn't the liberals call it "profiling?"

How soon will a lawsuit be brought against the police in Nassau and/or Suffolk County, alleging that the same techniques now showcased and lauded by Newsday actually constitute "profiling?"  And how will Newsday, with its decidedly leftist slant on the news, slant that story?

Just wondering.

Police Officers as a form of Entertainment

Sometimes even the police need help from the police.

Like Camille San Filippo and Jannet Velez, two of New York's Finest who witnessed a perp in the act, chased  the perp down into the nearby subway station, and were injured in the struggle.

San Filippo and Velez, though in plainclothes at the time, showed their shields to one Corbin, the New York City Transit Authority toll agent on duty at the time, who was safely ensconced in the toll booth.  San Filippo and Velez asked Corbin to call for reinforcements, which Corbin could easily have done by pushing a button and/or depressing a pedal.

But Corbin declined to do so.

When San Filippo and Velez sued the NYCTA and its parent entity, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the trial judge ruled in the defendant's favor and dismissed the lawsuit.  The Appellate Division, to its credit, reversed, and reinstated the lawsuit.

I will note that:

1.  New York City, you will recall, is where, in 1964, 38 people watched and did nothing as Kitty Genovese was beaten, raped and murdered before their eyes.

2.  I attended only one live professional boxing match in my life.  It was then that I realized that at such events, the gentlemen are the guys in the ring.  The wild animals are the people in the audience.  I don't care to be one of them, but I support their right to attend a boxing match for entertainment.  If you get your jollies watching such violence, then by all means go to the boxing match, but don't endanger the on-duty cops and the public by treating a scuffle with a perp as a spectator sport for you to drool over.

3.  As this post is being written, the MTA is actively promoting its "If you see something, say something" public safety campaign.  Query:  How can the MTA expect public cooperation when its own boys and girls don't say something when they see something?

Policing the Pill Poppers

Item: Letter to the Editor, Newsday, 12 January 2012, p. A33:


"Put Pharmacies inside Precincts"

The recent robberies and killings resulting from people's addiction to painkillers requires a very simple solution: Make pharmacies stop selling the pills and create a few centralized pharmacies on Long Island in police precincts for pickup of authorized controlled substances.

Then maybe not only will addicts stop filling these prescriptions, but maybe doctors will stop writing them or be held accountable for writing them.

Michele Zodda, St. James"



My comments, in no particular order:

1. Yes, our household receives home delivery of Newsday every morning. The many reasons why I am not the greatest fan of Newsday shall be dispensed with at this time, but here on Long Island the publication does have one minor thing to be said in its favor, namely that it is better than the New York Times. We have chosen to subscribe to it as a source of information, but are not very wild about it. A more practical reason why we subscribe: My wife's patients are always asking her about medical-related items appearing in Newsday, so she needs to know what Newsday published in order to affirm, qualify or (more frequently) debunk it when the patients ask her about it.

2. Lately, there have been a number of violent and deadly incidents at some Long Island pharmacies, perpetuated by drug addicts seeking to sate their chemical cravings. This Blog's posting of 23 June 2011 discusses one such horrific episode. discusses one such horrific episode. Newsday has been running an investigative series on the problem, implicating various physicians and pharmacists who have been less than careful in the prescription and dispensation of certain drugs. In that regard, Newsday is functioning as the press should function because its coverage of the matter will surely spur some reforms.

3. Though I never was really into the Dismal Science of Economics, I did take a number of Econ courses in college and in grad school. The phrase "a few centralized pharmacies on Long Island in police precincts" reeks of oligopoly if not monopoly. This would reduce competition in the marketplace, and raise the cost of prescription drugs. I know nothing about the letter writer, Michele Zodda (other than her address), but wouldn't it be ironic if she were in the camp of the Occu-Shmucks who crowded Zuccotti Park and whined (and continue to whine) about too much money and power being in the hands of too few?

4. More along those lines, what criteria would be used to determine which pharmacy entrepreneurs get to have those coveted concessions inside the police precinct stations? Who would make the decision? How could politics not play a role? And if politics does play a role, how could the big pharmacy chains not sink their resources into the venture, to the exclusion of the small business entrepreneurs?

5. Isn't the whole purpose of pharmacies and drug prescriptions to control the misuse of drugs in the first place? Why should the public tax money be used to duplicate a system that functions reasonably well in the first place? Shouldn't the system be tweaked instead of reinventing the wheel?

6. Why should the pharmacy industry be singled out? Shouldn't other high risk industries also be sited in police precincts? In such regard, try this little Googling exercise: restrict results to the prodeathpenalty.com website. Then google the following words or phrases: "Drug store," "drugstore," and "pharmacy." Each of those will get a small number of hits. Now try "convenience store" and you will get over 100 hits. Convenience stores are even more likely to be the scenes of violence than pharmacies.

7. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? With all due respect to my friends and clients in law enforcement, the powers of the police do need checks and balances. Indeed, the reason the United States has endured as a nation is because its governmental systems have had effective checks and balances. There will need to be measures taken to prevent the 7-Eleven concessions Michele Zodda would logically place in the police precinct stations from giving the police force too many free doughnuts. And, for that matter, Ms. Zodda's pharmacies from giving too many of their wares to the police officers.

8. I agree with Ms. Zodda that there is a problem. But changing the locations of the pharmacies will not resolve it. The problem is not that pharmacies stock controlled substances (remember, that is the very purpose of having pharmacies in the first place). The problem is that the pharmaceutical manufacturers have, over the past 30 or 40 years, bypassed the physician. The full color, full page display ads are not just in the New England Journal of Medicine and other physician-oriented publications; Big Pharma now spends billions to advertise in in newspapers and consumer-oriented magazines, and in the broadcast media. The physician is no longer a fully-empowered gatekeeper to keep controlled substances away from those who should not ingest them. As long as Big Pharma markets to the patients without the meaningful participation of the physician, the drug-related violence will be all the more exacerbated.

9. The police are too busy fighting crime. Why not just let the pharmacists be properly trained and armed? That would free up the police officers to do what they have been trained to do. Besides, at the precinct pharmacies envisioned by Ms. Zodda, the police would be under special obligation to bend over backwards in ensuring the criminals' constitutional rights. The private sector pharmacist with a Glock would not be held to quite the same standard.

I Know What I'll Hear Tomorrow

Breaking news:

There was an incident this evening at Baruch College CUNY in Manhattan, where the City University of New York's Board of Trustees was having a meeting, where one of the issues (if not the only one) was a proposal to increase tuition. The news has begun to go viral, but this posting will not link to it because I do not want to boost the hit numbers of the websites which are now spinning the story. I have watched the posted videos. My comments, in no particular order:


1. I have witnessed (and indeed, participated in) "nonviolent" demonstrations which were conducted with far, far better decorum.

2. The arrestees were apparently told to disperse and cease and desist, and were arrested only after failing to do so.

3. The people excluded from the Board of Trustee's meeting were denied admission because they did not register in advance. Advance registration is a prerequisite for admission. Advance registration is open to anybody.

4. Even with the proposed tuition hikes, CUNY's tuition is by far one of the best educational bargains available anywhere.



I'm sure that I will hear more about this one within the next 24 hours.

Some Burning Issues

My comments regarding the big Carmel forest fire in Israel, in no particular order:


1. Israel received significant foreign help in battling the blaze, including firefighting planes from Egypt and Turkey. Relations between Israel and Turkey had, just a few week ago, been at an all time low, but, on the occasion of the fire, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by telephone and cooperated in the effort. This tells me that something is afoot. I am not a foreign relations expert, but I would suspect that included amongst the dynamics that brought Erdogan and Netanyahu together are the following:

A. Turkey had started going anti-Western (not that it ever really, really has been pro-western) about the time Barack Hussein Obama won the United States Presidency. Erdogan probably viewed Obama as a weak leader, and placed his bet on Iran and the Saudis. But with the results of the midterm election last month, Obama's days are numbered, and Turkey will eventually have to deal with a Republican administration, which will not match Obama's tolerance for anti-American posturings. Turkey is not quite ready to totally wean itself from American aid, military and otherwise.

B. The Wikileaks fiasco revealed that many nations, including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, who are postured against Israel, nevertheless share Israel's opposition to Iranian armaments buildup, nuclear or otherwise. These nations are now quite ill-postured to criticize any anti-Iran statements or actions that Israel has taken, or may take in the future, thus increasing dramatically the odds for some sort of physical measures on the part of the Israelis. Also increased are the odds of significant Iran-backed terrorist activity on Saudi or Turkish or Egyptian soil. [It is still not clear how the fire started, but there is some very strong speculation that it was an act of terrorism.]. Maybe Ergodan now needs to cooperate with Israel more than he needs to knock Israel.


2. An estimated 10,000 people were evacuated from the fire. And 42 civilian uniformed services personnel, including a busload of corrections officers, have thus far died while actively fighting the fire -- approximately one-tenth the number of the firefighters, police officers, court officers and other civilian uniformed service personnel who died while responding to the Muslim attack on the World Trade Center. Israel's population is a little less than 8 million, while the U.S. population is approximately 310 million. Accordingly, multiply the Israeli numbers by approximately 38 to get an idea of the degree of the human toll taken upon Israel. [Imagine the evacuation of 380,000 people in the United States, and multiply the number of fallen World Trade Center firefighters by a little more than 3.]. Yet, the MSM in America are giving this fire very low-profile coverage.


3. Most of the aforementioned uniformed service personnel were corrections officers en route to evacuate a prison threatened by the fire. Due to the nature of the situation, the evacuation of a prison is not a straightforward operation like the evacuation of a school. It is, of course, very tempting to think that the prison should be allowed to burn with the inmates inside. But some of the inmates do actually get rehabilitated, and someone who is sentenced to, for example, 4 or 5 years should not receive the death penalty. It would have been highly irresponsible to not try to evacuate the prison. The corrections officers who died in the attempt died no less honorably than the New York City firefighters who died trying to rescue people from the World Trade Center.



4. As of this writing, the latest casualty was Haifa Police Chief Ahuva Tomer, the highest ranking policewoman in Israel. All of the feminazis are now in quite a predicament because Ahuva was an accomplished woman with a family who rose to the top of a decidedly male organization. And her attitude was, "I don’t feel like I’m special. I do function in a predominantly male society, but I am an equal among equals and I try to be the best I can. But women need to understand that this is not just a question of equality of opportunity, but also equality of responsibility."

So Ahuva has said a word that is anathema to the feminazis: "Responsibility."


5. Also feeling at least some very small degree of discomfort are the insular religious rabbinical figures and their followers. Ahuva is now being glorified for going off the baby-making Hausfrau track, and she died a heroine trying to rescue other Jews. It is people like that who maintain the safety of these rabbis and their students as they study in their yeshivas. Don't get me wrong -- I do believe that yeshiva learning is vital to the survival of the Jewish people (and, for about a year, I did put my hard-earned money where my mouth is when my own son learned in a yeshiva in Israel on my dime.). But such yeshiva learning is possible because there are men -- and women -- who place themselves in harm's way. Freedom is not free!

And, I am wondering how newspapers such as Hamodia or Yated Ne'eman, whose orientation is by and large with the rabbinical establishment, will spin the Ahuva story. I expect to learn in the next week or two when the Hamodia and Yated Ne'eman I read make their way through the usual pipeline to me.


6. I have long viewed Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu with a certain degree of chariness. Though he is not totally ineffectual, he has long been too soft upon the enemies of the Jewish people, and too quick to knuckle under to pressure. It must be remembered that his political career stands upon the dead body of his brother, Yonatan Netanyahu, the fallen hero of the Entebbe Rescue on 4 July 1976. The aforementioned Wikileaks scandal has shown Netanyahu to be even more of a wimpy capitulationist than most had pegged him for. If there is one thing that has come out of this forest fire fiasco, it is a demonstration to the world that Yoni Netanyahu was not the last Israeli who had any beitzim, and that there are more brave and valiant Israelis where the fallen heroes came from. If I were Benjamin Netanyahu, I would be quite concerned over this last matter even as I would welcome it.

Yahrzeit Boards

With few exceptions, every synagogue has one or more memorial plaque boards, (or "Yahrzeit Board," to use the Yiddish terminology) where the names of the departed are engrossed. They come in diverse styles, but typically, one donor underwrites the big board, which is then filled in with individual bronze plaques bearing the name and date of death of the deceased. Usually (but not always), there are light bulbs which are illuminated on the anniversary of the death, and also on holidays such as Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. In America, this information is typically in both English and Hebrew.

They are usually purchased by a family member, anyone with the funds and inclination can provide a plaque; in my own congregation, a few of us chipped in for a plaque for an upstanding community member who had suffered severe business reversals resulting in the loss of his home, and whose widow, we knew, could not afford the memorial recognition befitting her husband.

Even the reprobates among us are given the due respect of a memorial plaque, not so much to honor them as to signify the sanctity of life. I'm sure that the commissioning of the infamous gangster and snitch Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel 's memorial plaque for the Bialystoker Synagogue's yahrzeit board did not diminish in the least the posthumous punishment no doubt now being inflicted upon Bugsy, which he so rightfully deserves.

A synagogue's yahrzeit board often gives great insight into the character of the congregation. Which is why I often go out of my way to read each and every name on the board when I am in a synagogue that is not my own.

Today, for example, my wife and I were guests at a wedding held at a synagogue. So as not to go bonkers from the din of the dancing and music, I got up and walked around, and when I entered the main sanctuary, I read all of the names on the several yahrzeit boards there. This particular congregation has amongst its membership a large number of people who survived the Holocaust of Nazi Germany (and now, children and grandchildren thereof), and indeed, their founding rabbi himself was a survivor. This is reflected in the memorial plaques. For one thing, there is a whole wall in memory of the Holocaust, not unique but neither is it particularly common. And some of the individual bronze plaques on the yahrzeit board are for Holocaust victims. There is more than one plaque with multiple names, memorializing a family that was killed by the Nazis. One plaque, in fact, has four or five names and, in Hebrew, states that the date of their death and place of burial are unknown, and therefore, Yom Kippur, the holiest date of the year, will be celebrated as their yahrzeit day (my wife's grandfather did similar with his parents, whom he was unable to convince to leave what is now Moldova, and who disappeared during the war).

But the congregation also has a number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and this is also reflected on the yahrzeit board. In such regard, I saw a familiar name amongst the brass plaques. I saw a plaque with the name "Eugene Marshalik," who, you will recall, was a New York City Auxiliary Police Officer (and immigrant from the former Soviet Union) who died in the line of duty on 14 March 2007. And so, the demographic shift from Holocaust survivors to immigrants from the former Soviet Union is apparent on the synagogue's yahrzeit board.

Justice for Pekearo, Marshalik and Romero

Nicholas Todd Pekearo and Yevgeniy "Eugene" Marshalik were the two New York City Auxiliary Police officers killed in the line of duty last week on 14 March 2007. The actions of these heroes quite likely prevented even more deaths and injuries from the rampant gunman. As Auxiliary Police Officers, they were unarmed. Details of their cold-blooded murder, and of their respective funerals, are reported elsewhere.

In addition to the condolences to the families of APOs Pekearo and Marshalik, condolences are due to the third victim of the shooting rampage, bartender Alfredo Romero Morales. May they all rest in peace!

This posting spotlights two side issues to the aftermath of these fallen officers' heroic actions.


1. The assailant, David Garvin, is identified in many news reports as a "former Marine." Only a few news outlets, such as the New York Sun, bother to report that Garvin was discharged from the Marine Corps under less than honorable circumstances and that NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly is himself a retired USMC officer. Why are the Marines being given such negative spin?

2. The fact that two of the murder victims were police officers on duty is, to say the least, an aggravating circumstance which, all else being equal, should weigh very heavily towards imposition of the death penalty. But in New York there is no official death penalty (and even when the now-invalidated statute was on the books, Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau specifically had a policy against its use. Morgy has his reasons, apparently from his own near-death experience as a Navy officer during WWII, and I will not now castigate him for it. But society does lose something by not applying the capital punishment in the most egregious cases which scream out for it.

Even in those jurisdictions which do have an effective death penalty, it is a protracted and expensive process. The price of justice for a fallen police officer is very high indeed.

But in this instance here, other NYPDers who arrived on the scene, and who were armed, shot Garvin dead. On the plus side, the people of New York were saved the expense of bringing the killer to trial and then, supplying him with legal counsel, food, water, recreation, health care and oxygen for the remainder of his life. The families of APOs Pekearo and Marshalik were spared the agony of reliving the murder at the trial.

But death at the hands of a police officer, without the due process of the legal system, is in many respects the antithesis of justice. It is a leg-on to a totalitarian police state.

It is unfortunate that the justice these two fallen police officer received (and let us not forget Mr. Morales as well) from the barrel of a cop's service firearm was a better quality of justice than the New York court and penal system is now capable of providing.