Three days after he testified at a City Council hearing that the commission he headed to monitor police corruption was unable to do the job because the Police Department refused to cooperate, Mark Pomerantz has resigned, reports Newsday. Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor, said the job as chairman of the Commission to Combat Police Corruption required a full-time chairman. The commission was created by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Although Mayor Michael Bloomberg has vowed to make the police department more “transparent” than it was under Giuliani, “obtaining information about the department these days has become even more impossible than in Giuliani’s darkest hours,” says Newsday columnist Leonard Levitt. Pomerantz said the police department had decided the overtime abuse and alleged crime-doctoring were “administrative,” not “criminal” matters and refused to provide information to the commission. “Our entire tenure has been characterized by jurisdictional disputes about what constitutes corruption,” said a commission official who asked for anonymity. “They do not feel that such issues as falsifying overtime records involving tens of thousands of dollars and lying about it, or falsifying crime statistics and lying about them constitutes corruption.”
Link: http://www.newsday.com/mynews/ny-nyplaz224228102apr22,0,1353043.column