Original Text
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/nyregion/justice-thomas-d-raffaele-says-police-officer-struck-him.html?pagewanted=2&;_r=3

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Thomas D. Raffaele, a 69-year-old justice of the New York State Supreme
Court, encountered a chaotic scene while walking down a Queens street
with a friend: Two uniformed police officers stood over a shirtless man
lying facedown on the pavement. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his
back and he was screaming. A crowd jeered at the officers.



¶
The judge, concerned the crowd was becoming unruly, called 911 and reported that the officers needed help. ¶
But within minutes, he said, one of the two officers became enraged —
and the judge became his target. The officer screamed and cursed at the
onlookers, some of whom were complaining about what they said was his
violent treatment of the suspect, and then he focused on Justice
Raffaele, who was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The judge said the
officer rushed forward and, using the upper edge of his hand, delivered a
sharp blow to the judge’s throat that was like what he learned when he
was trained in hand-to-hand combat in the Army. ¶
The episode, Friday morning just after midnight — in which the judge
says his initial complaint about the officer was dismissed by a
sergeant, the ranking supervisor at the scene — is now the focus of
investigations by the police Internal Affairs Bureau and the Civilian Complaint Review Board. ¶
The judge said he believed the officer also hit one or two other people
during the encounter on 74th Street near 37th Road, a busy commercial
strip in Jackson Heights. But he said he could not be sure, because the
blow to his throat sent him reeling back and he then doubled over in
pain. ¶
“I’ve always had profound respect for what they do,” Justice Raffaele
said of the police, noting that he was “always very supportive” of the
department during the more than 20 years he served on Community Board 3
in Jackson Heights before becoming a judge. At one point in the early
1990s, he added, he helped organize a civilian patrol in conjunction
with the police. “And this I thought was very destructive.” ¶
The justice, who sits in the Matrimonial part in State Supreme Court in
Jamaica, Queens, was elected to the Civil Court in 2005 and the State
Supreme Court in 2009. Justice Raffaele was among the judges around New
York State who volunteered to perform weddings on the Sunday last summer
when New York’s same-sex marriage
law went into effect. The judge’s description of the confrontation and
its aftermath, which he provided in a series of interviews, was
corroborated by two people he knows who described the encounter in
separate interviews. ¶
Justice Raffaele and one of the men, Muhammad Rashid, who runs a
tutoring center near where the encounter occurred, said they were on the
street at that hour because the judge had spent most of that day and
night cleaning out his parents’ house and Mr. Rashid had just helped him
move two tables; he donated them to the tutoring center. ¶
The judge said his parents had just moved to Houston; he had taken them
to the airport that morning and the house’s new owner was to take
possession the next day. ¶
The judge said he was in “a lot of pain” and went with Mr. Rashid to the
emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where a doctor examined his
throat by snaking a tube with a camera on the end through his nose and
down his throat to determine whether his trachea had been damaged. The
doctor, he said, found no damage; Justice Raffaele was released and told
to see his personal doctor for follow-up care. ¶
When they first came upon the crowd, the judge said, he was immediately
concerned for the officers and called 911. After he made the call, he
said, he saw that one of the officers — the one who he said later
attacked him — was repeatedly dropping his knee into the handcuffed
man’s back. ¶
His actions, the judge said, were inflaming the crowd, some of whom had
been drinking. But among others who loudly expressed their concern, he
said, was a woman who identified herself as a registered nurse; she was
calling to the officer, warning that he could seriously hurt the
unidentified man, who an official later said was not charged. ¶
Justice Raffaele said that after the officer struck him and he regained
his composure, he asked another officer who was in charge and was
directed to a sergeant, who, like the officer who hit him, was from the
115th Precinct. He told the sergeant that he wanted to make a complaint.
¶¶
The sergeant, he said, stepped away and spoke briefly with some other
officers — several of whom the judge said had witnessed their colleague
strike him — and returned to tell the judge that none of them knew whom
he was talking about. As the sergeant spoke to the other officers, the
judge said, the officer who hit him was walking away.

¶
At the hospital, he said, he saw another sergeant from the 115th
Precinct, who took his complaint. He also telephoned the Police
Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. He said he was interviewed on
Friday by a lieutenant and a sergeant from a special unit in the bureau
called Group 54, which investigates complaints of excessive force.









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Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief
spokesman, said in an e-mail that all force complaints, whether they
involve serious injuries or not, are referred to the Civilian Complaint
Review Board, an independent agency that investigates allegations of
police misconduct that does not rise to the level of a crime. The
department’s Internal Affairs Bureau investigates complaints of
excessive force that involve serious injuries. ¶
“In this instance,” he said, Internal Affairs “is reviewing the
complaint because it was brought to its attention by the judge, not
because of the level of injury.” ¶
He did not respond to an e-mail with other questions about the episode. ¶
Police investigators, apparently from Internal Affairs, visited a number
of shops along 74th Street on Sunday, seeking to determine whether any
had security cameras that might have recorded a fight Thursday night
involving a police officer and two men, said Sunil Patel, the owner of
Alankar Jewelers. ¶
He said that he had security cameras, but that they did not capture any
images of the confrontation because the store’s security gate blocks
their view when the shop is closed. ¶
The office of the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, is working
with the Internal Affairs Bureau on the investigation, an official
there said. ¶
The administrative judge for civil matters for the State Supreme Court
in Queens, Jeremy S. Weinstein, who oversees the court where Justice
Raffaele sits, said he was surprised to learn of the encounter because
of what he said was the judge’s personality. ¶
“I think, universally felt, that he is one of the most soft-spoken,
thoughtful, decent human beings around,” Justice Weinstein said. “I
think his temperament is admired by certainly his colleagues in the bar
and I believe the community that he served.” ¶
Asked whether he intended to sue, Justice Raffaele said, “At this point, no, I don’t.” ¶
He added: “I do feel that it’s important for this person to be
disciplined. I don’t know if he should be an officer or not — what he
was doing was so violent.”