The 1972 Harlem mosque attack occurred on April 14, 1972, when a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer was shot and fatally wounded at the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 7 in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, United States. The officer responded to a fake emergency call, but was shot and died from his wounds six days later. The incident sparked political and public outcry about mishandling of the incident by the NYPD and the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay.
On April 14, 1972, a 10–13, or officer's call for assistance, from a man claiming to be a Detective Thomas was received by police. The call came from 102 West 116th Street, the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 7, where Malcolm X was once minister before his conversion to Sunni Islam. Officers Phillip Cardillo and Vito Navarra of the New York City Police Department's 28th Precinct responded, entering the mosque. [1]
When they arrived, they heard scuffling on the floor above. As they made their way to a staircase they were intercepted by fifteen to twenty men who forced the officers to retreat down the stairs and back into the hallway. Officers Victor Padilla and Ivan Negron, of the 25th Precinct, arrived and entered the premises. The four officers were outnumbered and were then attacked. Navarra was able to escape as a steel door was closed, trapping Cardillo, Padilla and Negron. [2] [3] [4]
According to the NYPD, the officers were attacked by around fifteen to twenty congregants, were beaten, and stripped of their guns. Padilla was then beaten and blackjacked into semi-consciousness while his partner fought off several men who were trying to grab his revolver. With his back to the door, Negron suddenly heard shots. He turned and saw a man with a gun in his hand who seemed to be getting up from the floor where Cardillo now lay shot. [3] [4]
Cardillo had been assaulted, stripped of his firearm and was shot at point-blank range. Negron, managing to free himself from his attackers, drew his revolver and fired three shots. It is not known if the man with the gun was hit; he escaped. Officer Rudy Andre of the 28th Precinct broke the glass on the front metal door and saw the patrolmen inside on their backs. He fired several shots through the broken glass into the hallway which scattered the men who had been assaulting the officers, thus enabling Negron to unbolt the double metal door. During the melee, Cardillo and Padilla were seriously injured. [2] [5]
Mosque representatives maintained that the officers entered with guns drawn and interrupted prayer despite repeated requests to leave their guns outside. During the initial attempt to enter the mosque, police officers, including Navarra, claimed that prior to being forced out, they witnessed a man named Louis 17X Dupree standing over the dying Cardillo with a gun in hand. After reinforcements arrived, allowing police to retake the mosque, Dupree and several others were initially arrested at the scene. However, before Dupree could be taken into custody, Louis Farrakhan and Congressman Charles Rangel arrived at the scene, threatening a riot if Dupree was not released. [6]
The NYPD's chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, was the ranking officer at the scene. He said years afterwards that he called Chief Inspector Michael Codd from the basement and asked for two busloads of police cadets, to be armed only with nightsticks, to keep the peace outside. Codd, Seedman said, refused, hung up the phone, and would not take Seedman's subsequent calls. [7]
Soon after, more officers arrived on the scene. An angry mob began to form around the police barricade, and began pelting officers with projectiles and calling them "pigs." Several high ranking police officials ordered all officers out of the mosque and sent away all white officers. [1] It was hours later before 300–500 people were able to peacefully exit from the mosque after negotiations. [8] Due to the lower police force and a still angry crowd, police abandoned the scene. [1]
A promise was made by Rangel and Farrakhan, according to Seedman, that Dupree and the other suspects would turn themselves in to the 24th police precinct the following day, though none ever did. Rangel denies making such a promise. A new police policy was summarily enacted, identifying the mosque as a "sensitive location," thus preventing an investigation into the shooting for two years. [1] Officer Cardillo died six days later at St. Luke's Hospital as a result of his wounds. [9] In a decided break with tradition, neither mayor John V. Lindsay nor the police commissioner at the time, Patrick V. Murphy, attended officer Cardillo's funeral.
The 'Detective Thomas' from the original false alarm 10-13 call was never identified. Many of the officers of the NYPD, including Detective Randy Jurgensen who was the Cardillo case's lead detective, believed the fake call to be either a diversion or a trap, possibly set by elements of the Black Liberation Army, which the NYPD blamed for numerous murders of police officers. [1] Others have suggested that the fake call was a pretext call from an FBI informant, intended to spark dissent under the COINTELPRO program. [10]
According to Cardillo's family, police investigators failed to follow procedure in investigating the shooting. [11] Due to political pressure, officers in the basement directed by Chief Seedman released a dozen suspects in the shooting without identifying them. The release of the suspects severely hampered the investigation. [12] Farrakhan later stated that the officers "charged into our temple like criminals and were treated like criminals."
Two years after the shooting, prosecutors brought charges against the mosque school's dean, Louis 17X Dupree, after an informant who witnessed the incident testified against him. Subsequent to the first trial culminating in a hung jury, Dupree was acquitted at the second, largely because ballistic evidence could not be recovered and Dupree's attorneys made the argument that either Cardillo shot himself or that he was shot by another police officer. [12]
In 2012, local police officers proposed to the Manhattan Community Board 10 that part of the street in front of the mosque be renamed after Officer Cardillo. [13]
Albert Seedman said he decided to retire that day, as he was walking back to his car and dodging bricks being thrown at him. He claimed at the time that his retirement had nothing to do with the incident. In 2012, however, a year before his death, he admitted that his disgust with Codd's refusal to provide the extra officers was his real reason, and he did not want to say so at the time because "I loved the police department so much that I couldn't drag it through the dirt by saying what those bastards did." [7]
Francesco Vincent "Frank" Serpico is an American retired New York Police Department detective, best known for whistleblowing on police corruption. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a plainclothes police officer working in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan to expose vice racketeering. In 1967, he reported credible evidence of widespread police corruption, to no effect. In 1970, he contributed to a front-page story in The New York Times on widespread corruption in the NYPD, which drew national attention to the problem. Mayor John V. Lindsay appointed a five-member panel to investigate accusations of police corruption, which became the Knapp Commission.
Crime rates in New York City have been recorded since at least the 1800s. The highest crime totals were recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic surged, and then declined continuously from around 1990 throughout the 2000s. As of 2023, New York City has significantly lower rates of gun violence than many other large cities. Its 2022 homicide rate of 6.0 per 100,000 residents compares favorably to the rate in the United States as a whole and to rates in much more violent cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans.
John Francis Timoney was an American policeman and law enforcement executive. He served as Chief of the Miami Police Department from 2003 to 2010. He was previously Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department (1998–2002) and held a variety of positions with the New York Police Department (1967–96), including its Chief of Department and First Deputy Commissioner. He worked for the Ministry of the Interior of Bahrain as a police consultant. Timoney drew both international praise and criticism for his handling of mass protests.
The Super Cops is a 1974 action adventure film directed by Gordon Parks and starring Ron Leibman and David Selby. The film is based on the book The Super Cops: The True Story of the Cops Called Batman and Robin by L. H. Whittemore. The film was released a few months after the successful cop movie Serpico.
Marlon Legere, a Trinidadian-American from New York, is the convicted murderer of NYPD detectives Robert Parker and Patrick Rafferty.
Benjamin Ward was the first African American New York City Police Commissioner.
A contagious shooting is a sociological phenomenon observed in police personnel, in which one person firing on a target can induce others to begin shooting without knowing why they are firing. The term may have been coined, but certainly rose to prominence in public discourse in the aftermath of the killing of Amadou Diallo by the NYPD in 1999.
Russel Timoshenko was a 23-year-old New York Police Department (NYPD) police officer who was shot on July 9, 2007, and died five days later, after pulling over a stolen BMW automobile in New York City's Crown Heights, Brooklyn, neighborhood. After a four-day manhunt that stretched across three states, all three suspects Dexter Bostic, Robert Ellis and Lee Woods were eventually apprehended and convicted—two of murder, and the third for weapons possession. At his widely attended funeral, Timoshenko was posthumously promoted to the rank of Detective. The case garnered national media attention because the weapons used were all illegally obtained handguns. This sparked widespread debate over gun control laws in New York City, and over the process by which firearms are traced by police departments.
The Harlem riot of 1964 occurred between July 16 and 22, 1964. It began after James Powell, a 15-year-old African American, was shot and killed by police Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan in front of Powell's friends and about a dozen other witnesses. Hundreds of students from Powell's school protested the killing. The shooting set off six consecutive nights of rioting that affected the New York City neighborhoods of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. By some accounts, 4,000 people participated in the riots. People attacked the New York City Police Department (NYPD), destroyed property, and looted stores. Several rioters were severely beaten by NYPD officers. The riots and unrest left one dead, 118 injured, and 465 arrested.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is structured into numerous bureaus and units. As a whole, the NYPD is headed by the Police Commissioner, a civilian administrator appointed by the Mayor, with the senior sworn uniformed officer of the service titled "Chief of Department". The Police Commissioner appoints the First Deputy Commissioner as the department's second-in-command and the Chief of Department as the department's highest ranking uniformed officer. The commissioner also appoints a number of deputy and assistant commissioners who do not have operational command and are solely for support and administrative function. The department is divided into twenty bureaus, six of which are enforcement bureaus. Each enforcement bureau is further subdivided into sections, divisions, and units, and into patrol boroughs, precincts, and detective squads. Each bureau is commanded by a bureau chief. There are also a number of specialized units that are not part of any of the bureaus and report to the Chief of the Department.
Throughout the history of the New York City Police Department, numerous instances of corruption, misconduct, and other allegations of such, have occurred. Over 12,000 cases resulted in lawsuit settlements totaling over $400 million during a five-year period ending in 2014. In 2019, misconduct lawsuits cost the taxpayer $68,688,423, a 76 percent increase over the previous year, including about $10 million paid out to two exonerated individuals who had been falsely convicted and imprisoned.
Albert A. Seedman was an officer with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for 30 years, known for solving several high-profile cases before resigning as chief of the Detective Bureau. He was the only Jewish officer to ever hold that position. After his retirement he was the chief of security for a New York area department store chain before retiring to South Florida.
Randy Jurgensen is a former American NYPD detective, best known as the lead investigator into the murder of patrolman Phil Cardillo as well as his contribution as a consultant on various film and TV projects.
The Dirty Thirty was a police corruption conspiracy that took place between 1992 and 1995 in the New York City Police Department's 30th Precinct, serving Harlem, and resulted in the largest collection of police officers charged with corruption in New York City in almost a decade. A group of rogue officers, led by Sergeant Kevin P. Nannery, participated in various unlawful activities, including civil rights conspiracy, perjury, extortion, grand larceny and the possession and distribution of narcotics. The scandal led to a number of arrests of police officers and two suicides.
On December 20, 2014, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley shot and killed Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu — two on-duty New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers — in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Brinsley then fled into the New York City Subway, where he killed himself. Earlier in the day, before he killed Ramos and Liu, Brinsley had shot and wounded his ex-girlfriend Shaneka Thompson in Baltimore after initially pointing the gun at his own head.
The murder of Brian Moore, a New York City police officer, took place on May 2, 2015, in Queens, New York, where he was shot. Moore died two days later at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, at the age of 25. His partner, Erik Jansen, was shot at but escaped injury. Demetrius Blackwell was arrested in connection with the shooting, and was formally charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, and other charges. On December 19, 2017, Blackwell was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.
The killing of Ramarley Graham took place in the borough of the Bronx in New York City on February 2, 2012. Richard Haste, a New York Police Department officer, shot Graham in the bathroom of the latter's apartment. The 18-year-old Graham was in possession of marijuana when Officer Haste tried to stop him on the street. Graham fled to his grandmother’s house, and went into the bathroom to flush the marijuana. Officer Haste forced his way into the building, kicked down the front door and then broke down the bathroom where he shot Ramarley Graham to death. Haste could be seen on surveillance cameras smiling and laughing with the responding officers and detectives—the same men who would later testify they had told Haste that Graham had a gun. Haste claimed to believe Graham had been reaching for a gun in his waistband, but no weapon was recovered.
Michael Joseph Codd was an American law enforcement officer who served as New York City Police Commissioner from 1974 to 1977.
On March 25, 2024, New York Police Department (NYPD) officer Jonathan Diller was shot while conducting a traffic stop in Far Rockaway, Queens. He was subsequently transported to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, where he died due to his injuries.