Things must be slow for Al Sharpton.
Maybe shaking down corporations with boycott threats isn’t as lucrative as it used to be. Maybe he misses being a presidential adviser.
Because Saturday he stood up in Harlem and caterwauled about something that took place three weeks ago and 250 miles away.
On October 4 – in Canandaigua, New York – a local police officer was involved in a gunfight that left an off-duty parole officer dead. It was pretty straightforward – and sad – but the incident got on Sharpton’s radar because the cop was white and the parole officer was brown.
And with Sharpton, it’s all about race.
Always.
No matter what.
That’s how racist people are.
And so he ranted and raved about how you couldn’t trust the locals and there was a conflict of interest and the truth hasn’t come out and the governor better get involved and the attorney general better get involved and he was going to put his weight behind it and all manner of other blather.
And along the way, he implied that a police officer killed a woman because of her race, and that local officials can’t be trusted because of their race. He called into question the integrity of various people and agencies, and slurred a community on the basis of stereotype.
Here’s what happened.
On October 4, supervisors at the state’s Division of Parole were concerned about an employee who hadn’t shown up for work. Sandy Guardiola was coming off sick leave and, though living in Canandaigua, was supposed to report to work in Binghamton.
But she didn’t.
So her bosses called her apartment manager. He knocked and got no answer. Parole called 911, to have the police stop and check her welfare.
Sgt. Scott Kadien showed up.
He knocked, announcing that he was a police officer and that people were concerned about her.
No answer.
The apartment manager unlocked the apartment and Kadien went in. Guardiola was nowhere to be found, but her bedroom door was closed. Kadien knocked and announced that he was a police officer.
Then he went in.
She was lying in bed. He spoke to her. She made eye contact and moved her lips, but no words came out. He stepped out of the small room and radioed for an ambulance, saying that she was semi-responsive.
He stepped back in to say he had called for help, and saw that she was holding a handgun, on the bed beside her. He ordered her not to raise it.
But she did. And she fired it.
He leapt back to the doorframe and drew his own weapon, her round having gone through the apartment’s walls and beyond. He ordered her to drop the weapon.
She did not.
Instead, she raised it at him.
And he fired three times, until she dropped the gun.
On Friday, a State Police captain said Kadien feared for his life.
Unsaid was the fact that Guardiola’s gun, though fired at Kadien, was a threat to unknown others each time it discharged. There were two people standing just outside the apartment. And any rounds that went through the walls could strike anyone anywhere for hundreds of yards in any direction.
It was a deadly dangerous situation and the police sergeant was bound by duty to end it.
And he did.
That is a sad thing. But it was a necessary thing. The inexplicable actions of Sandy Guardiola made it happen. Why she did what she did, we don’t know. But each year, something more than 100 American law-enforcement officers – like Sandy Guardiola – commit suicide. And each year, though statistics are uncertain, at least 150 Americans seem to commit “suicide by cop,” in which they provoke a deadly force incident with the police with the intent of dying in that incident.
This is a heartbreak, for the family of Sandy Guardiola, and for the family of Scott Kadien.
But heartbreak is not an excuse for falsehood. And claims made Saturday in Harlem are baseless and false. And it is wrong for Al Sharpton or anyone to turn grief into anger on the basis of deception.
Specifically, Sharpton called for the governor to investigate the death.
But the New York State Police, the governor’s police agency, have handled this investigation since the first minutes. This case has been handled independently from local officials all along – because local officials immediately asked state officials to take it over, to avoid any appearance of favoritism or conflict of interest.
Sharpton also called for the state attorney general to investigate the death.
But a state executive order – which Sharpton supported when it was enacted – only authorizes the attorney general to do so when an unarmed person is killed by the police. In this situation, Guardiola was not only armed – with a state-issued firearm – but fired her gun and initiated the gunfight in which she died.
And Sharpton’s allegations of a conflict of interest – he pointed out Kadien is also an assistant district attorney – fail to note that Kadien is an ADA in a different county from the one in which this case was investigated.
What Sharpton did was sully the reputation of a police officer and a community.
What Sharpton did was what Sharpton has done his whole career.
He lied.
NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 10: Al Sharpton attends 'The Terms Of My Surrender' Broadway Opening Night at Belasco Theatre on August 10, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images)