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Last week after a discussion of the question of handcuffing female criminal defendants, which I exposed as a barbarous practice comparable to Chinese foot-binding, I promised to take up the subject of handcuffs for male arrestees in this week’s lay sermon. I mentioned that handcuffs for females were prohibited in the original rule book that was in force during most of my time as a cop. I remember that clearly, but don’t recollect any specific instructions for males from those days. I believe it was left mostly to common sense. Any male who had to be arrested was a risk for possible resistance and had to be kept under control, but a lot of times this could be done just by keeping a grip on his arm while moving him here and there in the station house or courthouse.
Common sense is a good guide for dealing with males, even though today it’s often disregarded. It tells you that an alleged white-collar, that is to say, non-violent criminal who surrenders himself to the authorities by arrangement between them and his lawyer is hardly in need of restraint. When it’s applied to him it’s nothing but a circus stunt, as described in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Bonfire of the Vanities” when his protagonist Sherman McCoy is dragged through a hostile crowd into a holding pen full of thugs before being finally brought before a judge where a million dollars bail is demanded for him by the grandstanding D.A. McCoy is a first-time offender charged with leaving the scene of an accident. To the District Attorney, though, he’s a rare prize, the Great White Defendant, who can be abused freely for the purpose of demonstrating the D.A.’s commitment to equal treatment for defendants without regard to race, creed or color. The fact that the overwhelming majority of defendants are from minority groups, which are also capable of defeating the D.A. in the next election, has a great bearing on all this.
If you think a prisoner is a prisoner, no matter if he’s a murderer or a thimblerigger of an accountant who cooked the books somewhere, then you’ll agree with the D.A. above. If you think there are degrees of accountability even when it comes to crime, then you won’t. You won’t agree with the current handcuff craze, which sees business executives being treated like hardened criminals and dragged before judges in shackles--why?--so they won’t assault the prosecutor? To protect the judge? The court reporter? It’s all preposterous. The real reason, as everyone knows, is to make muggers and rapists feel good about themselves and enable them to tell themselves that actual human beings are really no better than they are. It’s a great comfort to them, no doubt, but is it really the objective of the criminal justice system that just because misery loves company we should see to it that criminals should always have this consolation to lay upon their souls? I know some people feel that guilt is an outmoded concept today and people shouldn’t be made to feel it, to go on “a guilt trip”, just because they’ve broken some silly law or some silly head or arm, because this will undermine their self-esteem and disrupt their personal development. But there are still people who see the other side of the question. Years ago Life magazine wrote up the activities of a Hell’s Kitchen detective in New York. One of the things he did was to address the local criminals as “germs” when encountering them. The writer was a little shocked at this kind of humiliation. Did the cop think it helped these men to be treated with such contempt? The detective told him that shame was a tool he used to make them confront themselves and realize what they really were. It worked sometimes, he said. Nothing else did.
There’s plenty of shame involved in being arrested, jailed, handcuffed, dragged off to court, facing a judge and all the rest of it, and on those with some sensibility it has its effect and has turned more than one lost soul around and made him or her a useful member of society. There are two types it doesn’t affect however. These are the unregenerate and the innocent. I call them innocent not because they are completely pure and free from sin, but because they know that they don’t deserve the type of treatment being handed out to them to suit somebody’s political agenda. Sure, they’re white-collar and upper-class, but discrimination is discrimination even when it’s applied to them.
One of the first and worst offenders in this area was none other than Rudy Giuliani, when he was United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In February 1987 he sent agents to Kidder, Peabody, stockbrokers on Hanover Square, New York, to arrest Richard Wigton, head of their arbitrage department, on charges of insider trading. He was taken off the trading floor in handcuffs and removed to the detention cells at the federal courthouse. Another executive, Timothy Tabor of Merill Lynch, was simultaneously arrested at his home and brought to the courthouse. Still another, Robert Freeman was arrested at his office at Goldman Sachs.
Giuliani has made a big record since those days, but hero worship shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that Rudy can be an opportunist of the rawest type, and this was his first demonstration of that side of his character. It has been known to backfire on him, though, as it did here. Of the three men arrested in Operation Wall Street only one, Freeman, was ever found guilty of any crime. The other two, Wigton and Tabor, never even had any charges brought against them and their cases were eventually dropped.
The facts above aren’t cited for their proof of government ineptitude in prosecuting people for crimes they never committed, but as an outstanding example of arrests being made for publicity and sensationalism when no need for them to be made at all existed in the first place. Wall Streeters have lawyers on call who can be trusted to deliver a defendant to the proper courthouse when the government decides to arrest him. No resistance is offered, bail is posted if required, and the defendant is allowed to leave to plan for his trial. The fireworks can come at the trial. If it results in a conviction and the defendant is remanded to jail, that will be time enough for the handcuffs to be brought out. I’ve seen many television documentaries featuring interviews with convicts who went through this polite process before being sentenced to long terms. In a prison uniform they look just the same as any man who was arrested at his office and hauled off to the lockup in front of all his fellow workers.
Never to be outdone in morbidity, I’ve often imagined myself as a defendant falsely accused of a brilliant swindle that dazzled Wall street, now being pursued by an ambitious prosecutor who has sent his men to humiliate me by handcuffing me and hauling me off to jail. I have a strategy for dealing with this outrage, but I won’t reveal it here for fear it might sometime be misused against other cops just following their orders.
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