Humpjones

The Life Cycle of The NYC Pig

Posted Mar 25, 2011

How am I still offending people in 2011? Don’t y’all know about me by now? Got a couple angry emails about Tuesday’s post, including this little gem:

“You should man up and apologize and think about all the cops who gave their lives for your safety or you lost another reader.”

Yeah, I’ve been watching that RSS ticker counting down to zero since I re-started the site...feels good. Maybe I can get it down into the double digit range with this one.

You already know I’m not going to apologize, just like I already know that despite your poodle threats, you’re going to keep reading this site for years to come. Since I’ve already started a big ugly conversation, let’s finish it off properly here today. They keep delaying my flight and besides, I can’t stop thinking about Moreno’s last words on that tape recording: “If you stop drinking, I’ll be your boyfriend. I’m not a bad man. I’m a good friend to have.”

Kenneth Moreno is 43 and he’s got 2 kids, at least, according to the papers. On December 7th, 2008, he responded to call from a concerned cab driver who had just driven a “drunk and vomiting” woman to her home but didn’t think she’d even be able to make it inside. Moreno’s accounting of events is meaningless in the face of the story told by surveillance video: they escorted her inside her building at 1 am and came out 7 minutes later. They returned 40 minutes after that and stayed inside the apartment for just over 20 minutes, then exited covering their faces. Then they returned at 3 am, and let themselves inside with the woman’s keys.

Franklin Mata’s soft, sad little baby face speaks volumes. His career as a cop lasted for three years and it’s over now because he had the sheer courage and moral clarity to stand guard as the “lookout” while Moreno raped an unconscious woman. One wonders what exactly he was looking out for. He sat on her sofa and looked around her living room and thought about whatever it is people think about when they’ve decided to wait on the sofa while someone gets raped in the next room.

Wait. Did I say Mata’s career was over? My bad...let me explain something.

Do you remember Kenneth Boss? Just kidding, of course you don’t...shit, half of you probably think that’s a fashion line. Kenneth Boss is the NYPD officer who killed Amadou Diallo, which is a name you really should remember. Kenneth Boss has something horrible in common with Franklin “Babyface” Mata and Kenneth Moreno: he’s still on the NYPD payroll.

Yup. Really.

It’s called the “Rubber Gun Squad” and it’s over 300 of the NYPD’s finest fuckups, collecting about $22 million every...single...year. In the case of Kenneth Boss, he’s been making an annual salary of $104,526 since he put 5 bullets in to Amadou Diallo on February 4th, 1999. For those of you into math, yeah, that’s about 12 years of paychecks, adding up to well over a million taxpayer dollars.

Now, look: obviously not all cops are rapists and blah blah blah. You can even make the case that cases like this are a good thing, because it indicates the NYPD is trying to break down the Blue Wall. Consider the case of Rubber Gun Squad member Alex Cruz, who was busted for falsifying paperwork to cover up the fact one of his fellow officers raped a 24 year old tattoo artist with his police baton in the middle of a subway station. At least Alex Cruz is off the beat, right? At least we catch a few more bad apples every year, right? Whatever. 

Just please don’t expect me to give a fuck about any of that when there’s no real consequences for these assholes. That’s not a weird legal wrinkle, that’s a serious cultural problem, and that’s the reason it’s impossible to see these men as anything but...pigs.

Filed in: Zeitgeist

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