After an hour and a half of going over bodycam video and award citations and training manuals, Michael Sipple sits at his mother’s dining room table, the plaques and medals infront of him, his hands in his lap, tears gathering in his eyes.
“How do I fix this?” he asks. “I’ve lived my whole life in service to others. What do I do? I feel like I’ve been abandoned. Not just by the city, but by everybody.
“Everything I’ve ever wanted to be in my life has been taken away.”
He’s a man of medium height, more pudgy than burly, whose first language is cop talk. He uses the phrases and mannerisms of American law enforcement, like a witness on the stand or an officer at a press briefing.
And he might be now where months at Walter Reed and in brain-injury rehab never took him, to the verge of a breakdown, to a place where he can’t see the light.
Michael Sipple was a Rochester cop, for eight years, after two years in the NYPD and a half a dozen years in the U.S. Army. But in the spring of last year, for a minute and 22seconds on Fulton Avenue, he got in the crosshairs, and this week he stood before a judge.
A judge who, for an astounding hour and a half, held forth from the bench in a point-by-point dissection of both Michael Sipple and what happened on Fulton Avenue. A dissectionwhich left Michael Sipple in disbelief at what he feels is the judge’s complete lack of a grasp of the facts of the incident or of his life.
He got three years of probation and the activists said it was a slap on the wrist. But it is a slap on the wrist that will probably cost him his house, and leaves him with noprospects for feeding the five children who depend on him. He is, at 36, in a place where he can’t see a path forward.
And when he talks about a fellow officer with a self-inflicted hole in his face, driven to it by frustrations with the department, his mother ads that that was what she was afraidof, what she watched for in him.
She was 18 and unmarried when he was born, back before she went to work on the ambulance and started wearing a uniform of her own. But those first years were hard and she raisedhim til the first-grade living in her parents’ home. In her parents’ home where every day Michael Sipple’s hero grandfather went to work wearing badge number 243 for the Rochester Police Department. The very same badge Michael Sipple, in fulfillment of a lifelongdream, was wearing that day on Fulton Avenue.
It was an overtime shift, a directed detail, out hunting down wanted persons.
It was something Michael Sipple was good at. It was something that brought him sheaves of letters of commendation from the chief. For getting drugs off the street, for gettingguns off the street. For incidents exactly like the one on Fulton Avenue.
When they were looking for a guy who looked just like a guy they saw on the street. A guy the officer with him got out to talk to.
While Sipple turned the car around.
That’s how they play it.
One officer gets out and approaches the person, the other officer stays in the car. That way, if the person bolts, the officer in the car can cut him off, or take up the chaseon foot when the first officer is exhausted.
So while the other officer went to the man who looked like the guy they were after, Michael Sipple turned the car around. And then he got out, over the course of seven seconds,and came over to the subject.
Who wouldn’t give his name.
Who Michael Sipple didn’t know had flashed his welfare card with another name.
Who Michael Sipple didn’t know had a history of baiting the police.
Who pulled away and reached to his waistband when Michael Sipple touched his arm.
It’s all on the body cameras.
A seemingly minor tussle that would be filler on “Live PD.”
But which left the guy with a broken bone in his face and Michael Sipple as the department’s sacrificial lamb.
The mayor cried for the cameras and talked about the racism her grandfather faced in the South. The district attorney is up for election and the judge is on his way out and itwas a convergence that meant Michael Sipple had to take the hit.
A hit, some officers say, he might have had coming – but not for what happened on Fulton Avenue. Rough around the edges, and too macho for today, for years his superiors lefthis small but growing problems unchecked. When he needed to be backstopped and corrected, the sergeants and lieutenants and captain looked the other way. And that wasn’t good.
Because Michael Sipple comes with scars.
He lost so many buddies in Iraq and Afghanistan that he has to wear two bands on his wrist to contain all their names. He spent months at St. Mary’s in brain rehab trying to recover enough fromtwo Purple Hearts to pass the police test. And he grew up, like everybody else, with his own particular brand of baggage.
But he passed a psych eval to get on the NYPD, and he passed another one to transfer to Rochester, and he passed one a month before Fulton Avenue, as part of a hoped-for transfer to the FairportPolice Department.
And when the judge talked about him bringing home baggage from the war, his mother had to get up and leave the courtroom.
“My son didn’t come home with baggage,” she said, “he came home a hero.”
And for years he did very well.
There are dozens of commendations, a couple of Officer of the Month plaques, a Lifesaving Award, a letter from the chief about the lunging grab of a woman trying to jump off abridge. And, behind them on the table, a small picture of him in military uniform, with combat medals resting on it.
“I went to work every day, trying to make a difference,” he said. “Trying to do the right thing.
“And this is how I’m repaid.”
With a five-day misdemeanor trial, denouncing statements by activists and politicians, the ginning up of anti-police politics, a 90-minute lecture from the bench, and a declarationby the judge that he will never be a police officer again. A promise that his boyhood dream is done and gone, never again to rise.
“It’s like nothing matters. All those years. Everything I did. How hard I worked. The people I helped,” he said.
“It’s all thrown away because of a minute and 22 seconds.”