Parades and Prosecutorial Misconduct

Are Mayor Mamdani's professed core values his actual deeply felt and firm convictions? When expressing them for public consumption, should they be crafted with more finesse and ambiguity, since many of his views are divisive and controversial, which may alienate potential voters in future campaigns?

Prudence today may avert emergency damage control tomorrow. 

Having been swept into office by a near landslide and being an ambitious politician with a national profile and grandiose designs, he must parlay his guiding philosophy into sweet talk and lip service as needed.

That's the real world of practical politics.

Will his tentpole of diversity cover a truly inclusive flock? He suavely drew a distinction between himself as a public servant and his wife as a private person, given allegations of her notorious hints of affinity on social media related to the Middle East.

To know where any mayor stands, note which parades he attends and which culturally-sensitive bullet points he mouths.

After sending mixed signals, Mayor Mamdani did indeed appear at, more than in, the St. Patrick's Day parade. He less marched in it than treaded on it. The Catholic League observed that the mayor's "obsession with demonizing Israel was on full display," and that he "hijacked St. Patrick's Day celebrations by turning them into a radical...rant."

I had expected him to attend as a politically calculated gesture of reconciliation with Catholics, many of whom felt slighted by the mayor's non-attendance at the recent installation of Ronald Hicks, New York's next archbishop. 

It's been almost a century since a mayor bypassed this ceremony, and the mayor will want to correct speculation that he was being intentionally disrespectful, as former Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was when she shunned the annual Al Smith Dinner, hosted by former Archbishop Dolan which raised money for Catholic charities.

The Columbus Day parade could be "complicated," a word that is now used to veil the earnest face of frankness. 

Mamdani may give the parade the cold shoulder, given that he literally gave the middle finger to a statue of Columbus. He demanded that it be removed, much to the dismay of the Italian-American community, who agreed with the New York Post that the explorer "heightened humanity's horizons" and was not a genocidal colonialist, as Democratic Socialists maintain.

Sounds like an irreconcilable difference of opinion.

In deciding which parades to attend, mayors must first identify which groups it is politic to patronize. They must weigh risks and benefits to their career cravings and aspirations. They must know when to pander and who they can afford to alienate because of their low numbers or relative political impotence or apathy.

Parades can be flashpoints.

Two years ago, a crisis arose regarding the depiction of a Hindu temple in the India Day Parade, because the temple had been built on the ruins of a 16th century mosque that had been destroyed by nationalist mobs in 1992. Former Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul sided with the Islamic community which felt the display was anti-Muslim.

 It's a sure bet that Mayor Mamdani will give the Salute to Israel Parade the coldest of shoulders.

The Village Halloween Parade and the Coney Island Mermaid Parade will probably be on the mayor's calendar, since his image-makers and promoters want to promote him as a dyed-in-the wool, regular guy out for some innocent New York fun.

Thanksgiving Day used to be a holiday to which everyone could relate. Not much chauvinism, commercialism or parochialism. Hopefully the mayor will go easy on us and refrain from an unsolicited history lecture on wicked genocidal European settlers.

Many of the abundance of ethnic, national, religious and cultural minorities in the melt-resistant pot of New York have their own parades which we should all share in spirit. They show that diversity and unity are co-dependent and serve the general welfare. The Caribbean-American, Puerto Rican and Dominican parades, among others, will likely appeal to the mayor.

He may skip the Steuben and Greek Independence Day parades but may opt for a symbolic calzone at the Feast of San Gennaro. Will he have the intestinal fortitude to support the annual Armenian Genocide Commemoration in Times Square in April?

Some parades will be closer to the mayor's heart than others. The New York Gay Pride parade has profound significance that bridges all communities.

The Stonewall Inn, where it is generally conceded the modern gay rights movement in this country began in 1969, was recently forced by the Trump administration to remove its LGBTQ flag because of the petty technicality that only the American flag can be displayed at officially designated national monuments. 

Will Mamdani be in two minds about Veterans Day, given certain of his doctrinal leanings and tendencies to attribute some of our foreign engagements to imperialism and racism? I expect there will be no impediment, however, to his respecting the solemnity of Memorial Day and revering the memory of fallen soldiers.

Without a doubt, he will proudly and unabashedly march in the Labor Day Parade, as should a higher percentage of New Yorkers than usual. Mamdani has represented himself as a champion of labor, and has proposed initiatives that he believes, arguably accurately, will directly or indirectly, improve the lives and standard of living of all City dwellers. 

The mayor is an ideological sectarian for "social justice," but less an aficionado of "equal justice under law" for groups he deems privileged or advantaged, according to a personalized definition, rather than objective criteria and data. His agenda is a "mixed bag," but in some areas, but in some isolated areas, it is grounded in idealism and quests for real solutions.

He has identified institutional corruption at every stage of the criminal justice system. 

His advocacy of cashless bail, downgrading classification and penalties for offenses, and "restorative justice," rather than proportional punishment or letting the punishment fit the crime, are dubious in the public's eye, as is his insistence that Rikers Island be closed.

But his initiatives to give prisoners educational and housing opportunities, and job training so that they can reenter and contribute positively to society, is not evidence of weakness, but of strength from both humanitarian and economic standpoints. They are endorsed by most New Yorkers.

Mamdani, to his credit, has no patience for a problem that has festered for years: prosecutorial misconduct.

The business of some errant prosecutors is to secure convictions by any means necessary. They will ignore, bury, hide or tamper with evidence that would establish the innocence of the accused. They may also, according to Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University, engage in inflammatory conduct in the courtroom and suborn perjury. 

They should be targeted by an enlightened society with the harshest retributive wrath of which it is capable. They shouldn't be free to go home, after a wrongful conviction enabled by their chicanery, to say to their spouse, "Hey darling! I nailed that guy for eviscerating a mother of three and charmed the jury into thinking my hunch was good enough evidence Now let's celebrate with a ribeye at Smith and Wollensky."

Neither should defense attorneys who knowingly get thugs off the hook escape indemnification. Society's conscience should be codified in law and embedded in practice.

The number of falsely convicted prisoners is probably exaggerated by "innocence advocates," but it is likely not infinitesimal. In cases where guilty verdicts were obtained clearly as a result of deliberate error by prosecutors, they should lose their credentials, their freedom and their pensions, and pay reparations to their victims.

New York's Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct was finally created in 2021 after ten years of grueling and unavailing lobbying in Albany. An administrator was appointed to investigate complains. According to Gothamist, the only finding and recommendation yielded so far is the case of an upstate district attorney who tried to pull rank when pulled over at a traffic stop.

The case of a man wrongly incarcerated for a quarter century wasn't gotten around to.

Of 470 complaints received in the last two years, the commission has completed "preliminary" reports for a third of them, and 18 investigations have been launched, according to Gothamist, which reports that for much of the inaugural year of the commission, its administrator, who was not to blame, had no office and worked from home.

Mayor Mamdani should use his bully pulpit to give the Commission a "shot in the arm." We could use a Parade for Justice, except it would be co-opted by all sorts of crusaders, romanticists and revisionists.