The Path Whisperer

Why does this person still have a job?  I wrote a request for all records pertaining to myself under the New York FOIL law and have received two woefully incomplete (obviously and ridiculously incomplete) responses.  The second response was an appeal from the first response.  Jonathon David now informs me that my only recourse left is to bring a Article 78 proceeding in court, i.e., to sue them.   So, . . . the NYPD has to be forced to obey the law?  When the law is very clear?  This apparently happens all the time (see articles referenced below).  Why haven’t the courts slapped them down.  Courts usually don’t like being bothered with matters that could and should have been handled adminstratively.

Whenever there is a problem of a culture gone bad in an organization, the first targets are logically the exemplars, the public standard bearers of that faulty culture.  Here in NYC we have a police culture of arrogance and individuals seemingly believing that not only are they above the law, that they are the law.  Jonathan David and his office carries out that behavior in broad daylight.  He should be fired and the office reorganized.

Please don’t think this is my personal opinion/problem.  The NYPD Legal Dept. is quite famous.  Amazingly they claimed the Freedom of Information Law didn’t apply to the FOIL process itself.  .  .  .  Huh???

From The Village Voice’s The NYPD’s a Little Confused About How the Freedom of Information Law Works:

Since late last year, MuckRock reporter Shawn Musgrave had been trying to get the NYPD to release “any manual, training reference, or other guide” explaining how the department processes freedom of information requests. The cops had refused the request though, arguing — with a deeply symbolic bit of circular logic — that the freedom of information procedures themselves weren’t subject to New York’s Freedom of Information Law.

. . . . NYPD received jabs from outlets far and wide because, really, dashing off a post about the whole FOIL mobius strip was too good to pass up. FOIL policies exempt from FOIL? Blog and blog.

While it’s unusual for FOIL officers to talk publicly about individual requests, Jonathan David, the attorney charged with answering Musgrave’s letters, tells the Voice the whole thing was really a misunderstanding. In his view, the patrol guide, which contains pretty limited FOIL discussion, didn’t qualify as a training manual.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2014/07/the_nypds_a_little_confused_about_how_the_freedom_of_information_law_works.php

Come on.  Our tax money goes to these people?  “Training manual”?  Nice little trick, selective memory.

NYPD Rejects Freedom Of Information Law Request For Their Freedom Of Information Law Handbook

. . . But this latest rejection is for the exact guidelines that spell out which records must be released and which can be withheld from the public. Few documents are better suited for release under the Freedom of Information Law than a freedom of information handbook.  http://gothamist.com/2014/03/21/nypd_transparency.php

The NYPD does, in fact, have a Freedom of Information Law guide. Someone tell its Freedom of Information Law unit, which for months has denied emphatically that any such document exists.  https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/jul/02/nypd-has-freedom-information-handbook-after-all/

I’m quite aware that many of my readers disagree/disapprove of my listen-to-the-force-luke-skywalker/let your subconscious be your guide approach to recognizing psychopathy.  A more objective approach is to pay attention to thinking patterns, psychopathic arrogance and  types of lies as avenues to recognizing psychopaths.  Psychopaths love to turn situations on their head — such as, FOILs don’t apply to FOILs (it’s called the ‘180 Rule’ – http://180rule.com/psychopaths-girardian-theory-the-180-rule/).  That’s also a pre-logical thinking pattern, another trait of psychopaths.  It is also very arrogant.  If my services had been hired, I would have started with those NYPD positions that have the capability of protecting other psychopaths within the force.

Back to my situation, my original request asked that the psychopathic NYPD police officer (identified by his DPL/DPA license plate numbers which I had learned through their harassment of me over the years) I have referenced elsewhere not be allowed to play a part in deciding what to release or not.  (See, To the de Blasio administration, I hereby volunteer to identify NYPD whiteshirt psychopaths, gratis, Is there a ‘Training Day’ crew in the NYPD and are they targetting me?, and other posts tagged NYPD.)   The first response included only a traffic ticket and a complaint that I had filed that didn’t involve him or my ex.  Clever, very clever.  He couldn’t have done better if he had chosen himself.  While the complaint didn’t involve them, at the time I though it might and thus I referenced other complaints I had made about telephone harassment.  Obviously these should have been, and were included in the second response.  However the source/telephone numbers of that harassment was not included (which a detective had in fact given me originally, so they do have them).

Also unincluded were files regarding the time I was served by the police and my ex with papers to appear at mediation, or complaints that she mentioned having filed prior to that mediation (which I was not aware of her having done).  It is patently ridiculous that these not be included (non essential material could be redacted of course).  I’m not that interested in this material, these events were some 20 years ago, but obviously any complete file would include them.  Further there was nothing indicating why extremely hostile (and apparently disgusted??) auxiliary cops were posted at my corner and armed cops at the therapists’ corner for weeks in 2011.  Nor was there anything referencing any political activism on my part.

I was told that requests had to include the when and the where — in other words one can only ask about material that one already knows about.  You can’t even ask if there are any unknown complaints filed against you because if they are unknown you don’t know enough to ask for them!!  Sounds like the 180-Rule to me.

My goal with the FOIL was hopefully to find out the character assassination/whispering campaign that my ex and her cop friends seem to be the font of.  It is taken very seriously, scares people and has caused many to turn their face to the wall rather than give a friendly hello as they had done for years (inducing ‘refusal to associate’ is a crime).  More later.