Like his fellow leftists, New York City’s Communist Twelver Shi’ite Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made his disdain for the NYPD abundantly clear. On Thursday, courtesy of a leftist judge, this contempt played out in a particularly graphic manner, with a former NYPD sergeant being led away in handcuffs to begin serving years behind bars for taking swift and decisive action that resulted in the removal of a drug dealer from the streets. New York is less safe for it, and that’s apparently exactly what Mamdani and his comrades want.
The New York Post reported Thursday that Erik Duran, who up until all this happened had been an NYPD sergeant, “was hauled away in handcuffs Thursday after a Bronx judge slapped him with up to nine years behind bars for killing a fleeing drug suspect by throwing a cooler at him.”
This was not a gratuitous act. Duran was acting quickly to prevent the flight. This most salient of facts, however, made no difference: Duran was “found guilty of manslaughter in February for causing the Aug. 23, 2023, death of Eric Duprey — becoming the first NYPD officer convicted of killing someone while on duty in a decade.”
It seems that Duran was convicted for “chucking the full Igloo cooler at Duprey, who was riding his motorbike on a Kingsbridge Heights sidewalk after selling $20 worth of cocaine to an undercover officer.” Duran explained under oath that he “threw the cooler to protect his fellow officers, toward whom he said Duprey was zooming on his scooter.” Duran said: “I thought he was going to kill my guys.” Prosecutors would have none of this, and contended instead that Duran “chose to throw the cooler at Duprey to stop him from fleeing and avoiding arrest.”
This is what we have come to: a police officer who tries to stop a suspect from fleeing gets arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned. This is because “after being struck in the arm by the cooler, Duprey crashed into a tree and was flung from the bike, cracking his head on the pavement. He died almost immediately on impact.”
Clearly, Duran did not intend to cause Duprey’s death, but nevertheless, Bronx County Supreme Court Judge Guy Mitchell, an appointee of former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, found the police officer “guilty of second-degree manslaughter, ruling that Duran’s use of ‘deadly force’ was not justified.” Whether he intended to exert “deadly force” is highly questionable in itself, but nevertheless, Mitchell “sentenced Duprey to at least three years in state prison, and up to nine, inside a packed Bronx courtroom filled with police officers on one side of the gallery and a mix of Duprey’s relatives and activists on the other side.”
Given the prevailing attitudes toward cops among prisoners, this could well be a death sentence. Duran is quite likely to be attacked and could even be killed in prison, where the fact that he is in prison for the death of a criminal will only make him more hated. If Mitchell doesn’t know this, he should know it, and should have taken it into account during the sentencing. And for all we know, maybe he did.
The president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Vincent Vallelong, drew out the sobering implications of the case, saying: “Today will be forever remembered as one of the darkest days in the history of our profession.” Vallelong explained that “it wasn’t only Sgt. Duran, a great cop, who was on trial. Every law enforcement officer who makes a split-second decision in the performance of their duties to protect the public, was also on trial. And this sentencing, which has now sent a very chilling message to every cop in the nation — that the system that we have sworn to uphold can single-handedly destroy your career and your life for doing exactly what you are trained to do.”
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Shades of Derek Chauvin. Duran can at very least be grateful that this incident cannot be portrayed as one of racial bias, or he would have experienced the left’s wrath even more strongly than he did. Vallelong, however, vowed that this case wasn’t over: “Moving forward, the SBA will do all that we can to support Sgt. Duran and his family throughout his appeal and we will not stop until justice is served.”
Mitchell could have freed Duran. Instead, he has put him in a situation where he will fear for his life every minute. The destruction of Erik Duran’s will have an inevitable chilling effect throughout the NYPD as it tries to do its job in Zohran Mamdani’s New York. Leftists seem intent upon ensuring that the American people will be defenseless.
