By DEANNE STEWART
Ken Thompson was celebrating his win and making the transition into serving Brooklyn as its new district attorney after defeating Charles Hynes in the Democratic primary.
As it turned out, Hynes has decided to seek re-election on the Republican and Conservative lines in the Nov. 5 general election – and Brooklyn will have to wait to see if it will have its first black district attorney.
Thompson would become only the second black district attorney in the state of New York and, considering the sometimes contentious relationship between the Police Department and the black community that makes up 34 percent of Brooklyn’s population, his election could be of great significance.
“The district attorney is in a position to put a lot of pressure on the police,” said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College who is an expert on policing.
Tensions between police and Brooklyn’s black community have surfaced in such highly publicized matters as the 1997 assault on Abner Louima in Flatbush and the shooting death of Kimani Gray earlier this year in East Flatbush that led to four nights of protests.
The department’s stop-and-frisk policy also puts further strain on this relationship.
Thompson, the son of a former police officer, has already expressed disdain for the stop-and-frisk policy, saying that it is used excessively and abused. “I want stops based on reasonable suspicion, not race,” Thompson said.
Reports from the New York Civil Liberties Union show that blacks account for 53 percent of all stops. In just two Brooklyn neighborhoods, Brownsville and East New York, there were 56,267 stops combined in 2011 – more than 50,000 of them producing no allegation of wrongdoing.
“We cannot have tens of thousands of young black and Latino men stopped and frisked on the streets of Brooklyn without reasonable suspicion,” Thompson said in an interview with NBC’s news website The Grio.
Some Brooklyn residents agree that if Thompson becomes district attorney, he would end up bumping heads with the department.
“This could create more tension with the NYPD,” said East New York resident Erica Armstrong. “Thompson seems to get it and seems like a no-nonsense guy. Feels good to finally have someone on our side.”
If Thompson is anything like Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson, the state’s first black district attorney, he’ll have some testy encounters with the Police Department.
“The power is of a D.A is indirect,” said Vitale. “Thompson can refuse to take cases and say he won’t prosecute certain types of cases like the Bronx D.A. Robert Johnson did with trespassing arrests.”
Last year, Johnson told the Police Department that he would no longer prosecute people who were arrested for trespassing on public housing property unless the officers were willing to sit down and explain why they were arrested. This came after complaints from many residents who said they actually belonged in the buildings they were arrested in. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Johnson was overstating the problem, but trespassing arrests fell sharply in a blow against the stop-and-frisk program.
Hynes gained prominence as a special prosecutor who won the conviction of three white teenagers in the racially motivated slaying of a black man, Michael Griffith, in Howard Beach in 1986. As Brooklyn district attorney, he has been praised for pursuing alternatives to incarceration.
But he also has been heavily criticized for a string of cases in which innocent people were convicted of murder and other serious crimes. Thompson has raised that in his campaign, saying that a district attorney’s role is to ensure justice and fairness.
Against that background, the black community may be more invested in this race than in previous ones for district attorney.
“I don’t usually follow the DA’s race but this one is interesting,” said college student Destiny Jones, a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Thompson seems like he won’t let the NYPD continue with unfair treatment.”
Photo: Ken Thompson.
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