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CCNY'S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER   OCTOBER 2000 VOLUME 3, NUMBER 1

A pistol in the park:
NYPD Officer Pulls Gun on CCNY Grad Student in St. Nicholas Park
By Rob Wallace

In the early morning hours of July 8, the life of a Biology graduate student was threatened by a New York police officer in nearby St. Nicholas Park. The incident began what was to become a twenty three-hour nightmare for the student who was jailed and later sentenced to a day of community service on what appears to be false testimony by the officer.

Richard Sorrentino, 33, is a doctoral student in biology at City College. He is a graduate of New York University. He spent six years in the US Army Reserve, serving during the Persian Gulf War. He subsequently returned to New York and, after a few years, earned a Master’s degree in biology here at CCNY. Thereafter he became a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate School, and is still based at City College.

Sorrentino told The Messenger he regularly puts in 10 to 12-hour days in his lab at CCNY, working on his dissertation on the genetics of tumor growth in fruit flies. He usually leaves the campus for home anytime between 11 pm and 1 am out the back exit of the Science Building. He crosses St. Nicholas Park down the steep main pathway of the park to the 135th Street subway station on St. Nicholas Avenue where he catches the C train home.

Confrontation

On July 8, Sorrentino left the campus later than usual, at 3:30 am. At the first landing of the main stairs of the park, a NYPD patrol car passed him on the park’s roadway. The officers in the car did not stop him, although, he was later to find out, the park was now considered “closed.” As Sorrentino made his way down the stairs he saw two officers get out of their patrol car and start walking around the park. “They said nothing to me,” Sorrentino told The Messenger.

Sorrentino, forgetting the officers, continued along the well-lit pathway of the park toward the subway. At the last landing before St. Nicholas Avenue Sorrentino told The Messenger he heard a voice call out from the dark to his right. Sorrentino characterized the voice as “rude and high-and-mighty.”

The voice informed him the park closes at 10 pm. When Sorrentino looked toward the direction of the voice, he saw only a dimly lit face above a flashlight. Sorrentino told The Messenger he responded “That’s the first I heard of it!” and continued walking.

According to Sorrentino he later found a sign with the park’s closing time on the St. Nicholas Avenue side of the park. The official complaint against Sorrentino declared that the park “has signs posted at every entrance that the park closes at 10pm.” But The Messenger found no such sign at the CCNY entrance Sorrentino used.

The voice again ordered Sorrentino to stop. “I responded something to the effect that whoever he was he was being rude and I bewailed the lack of manners today. And I continued walking,” Sorrentino recounted.

The voice again ordered him to stop. At this point Sorrentino stopped and a uniformed police officer about 20-25 years old emerged from the dark onto the lighted pathway. According to Sorrentino, at no time during this initial exchange did the officer verbally identify himself.

Escalation

In what has become an urban ritual directed against young men, Officer Donald Hook of the 26th Precinct demanded Sorrentino his name, ID, where he was going and what he was doing in the park. Hook ordered Sorrentino to show his hands, which he did palms up. The verbal exchange continued.

Then, the confrontation escalated. Hook took out his gun, pointed it Sorrentino’s head, and demanded he get down on the ground. “The pistol was about a foot away from my face,” said Sorrentino. Sorrentino made no response, verbal or physical. “I simply stood there,” said Sorrentino.

Hook ordered him on the ground two more times, and Sorrentino again did nothing. “I refused because I do not like taking orders at the end of a gun,” Sorrentino said.

Hook’s partner, an Officer Guidice, appeared and Hook reholstered his gun. Sorrentino was handcuffed and arrested for trespassing. According to Sorrentino, in the car Hook declared he took his gun out because he was “afraid for his life.”

Sorrentino was brought to the 26th Precinct on 126th Street and, after making a call to his father, was placed into a holding cell. When Sorrentino’s father arrived at the precinct he was not allowed to see Sorrentino. Sorrentio was moved to the 28th Precinct and later downtown to another jail, the infamous “Tombs” near Manhattan Criminal Court.

It wasn’t until 2 am the next day, July 9, that Sorrentino’s case was brought before a judge. Sorrentino’s Legal Aid attorney requested an ACD for Sorrentino for which his record would be sealed after six months without a subsequent arrest. The prosecutor convinced the judge to tack on a day of community service because Officer Hook claimed Sorrentino told him “Fuck you.”

“At no time during the incident had I uttered a profanity,” Sorrentino told The Messenger. Messenger calls to the 26th Precinct were unreturned.

Sorrentino spent the following Saturday helping clean up a subway station to satisfy the community service punishment. “I got to wear the little orange vest and my dad came down and took action photos,” Sorrentino cracked. “But cleaning a whole station’s no joke. It’s a lot of work. They got free labor out of me,” he continued.

Not in Central Park

Sorrentino admits that technically he was trespassing. But he also said he had gone through the park after 10 pm for four years without incident. He often saw at least one other person in the park. No one ever bothered him. On rare occasions Sorrentino would see NYPD vehicles in the park, and, as he stuck to the lighted path, they presumably saw him too. But these police had never accosted or challenged him before.

According to Timothy Hubbard, CCNY’s Security Director, under former president Yolanda Moses CCNY worked with the NYPD and the Hamilton Heights Homeowners Association, among other groups, to “clean up” the park. This included instituting a closing time for the park in 1998. Hubbard called the closing time an attempt to make it “not comfortable for criminal elements.”

When informed of what happened to Sorrentino, Hubbard called what the officer did “not righteous” as the “whole purpose of the park closing time is to capture wrongdoers.” Hubbard said it seemed a case of egos.

Hubbard said that if students find themselves in such a situation with a police officer they should “hold their temper and complain at a time more to their advantage.” Presumably that would be before a judge, but that time didn’t seem to be to Sorrentino’s advantage either.

Sorrentino told The Messenger he was most worried about the extralegal aspects of the incident with Officer Hook. “On any given night, many New Yorkers ‘trespass’ in Central Park in full view of the NYPD,” he said.

Sorrentino sees this as an example of selective enforcement. “St. Nicholas Park is in a neighborhood whose residents are predominantly African-American and who are not wealthy. Central Park is almost completely surrounded by neighborhoods that are predominantly white and well-to-do,” he continued.

He also connected the incident to a larger geography of race in New York: that people are expected to stay in their “own” neighborhoods. “It seems Hook thought because I’m white and was in the park in this neighborhood at 3 am I was looking to score drugs,” he told The Messenger.

For Sorrentino, anyone who violates the “own” neighborhood command risks the threat of institutionally protected violence. According to Sorrentino, since the shooting of Amadou Diallo police officers seem to think they can excuse whatever excessive force they commit “by uttering the verbal disclaimer of being afraid for their lives.”

“But Hook’s the one with the gun a foot from my face. Shouldn’t I be the one afraid for my life?” asks Sorrentino.

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