Commissioner of Public Safety Tim Coll, left, and Mayor John Safford, center, were elected to calm the city's waters.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — A reader named Stephen wrote me expressing fury at the treatment of former Troy officer Jarrod Iler, who was briefly considered for a police job in Saratoga Springs.
On Tuesday, city officials scrapped hiring Iler in the face of intense backlash resulting from his 2017 shooting of Dahmeek McDonald, a Black motorist who, according to police, was driving his car at the officer. A grand jury convened by a special prosecutor declined to file charges against Iler, in part because an FBI ballistics analysis largely corroborated the officer's account.
In Stephen's view, Iler was unfairly demonized when there's no evidence he did anything wrong.
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"Do you think he deserved this?" he asked in an email.
I don't. Iler deserved better.
Many of the people who continue to condemn Iler would insist that any other defendant — one who isn't a cop, I mean — deserves due process and the presumption of innocence. Were any other defendant cleared, they would say the story is over, as it should be.
But the standard changes for police officers. In a way, that's understandable, as we've seen cases in which unjustifiable police violence was excused and even covered up. That's about what happened in Troy after the fatal shooting of Edson Thevenin, also a Black motorist.
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Police officials initially said the 2016 shooting was justified and Joel Abelove, the Rensselaer County district attorney at the time, rushed the case to a grand jury. A subsequent report by former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and an internal affairs investigation headed by Joseph Centanni, now the police chief in Watervliet, exposed lies in the official version of events.
I've said the handling of Thevenin case was an outrage that stains the tenure of Patrick Madden, now (thankfully) the city's former Democratic mayor. But that case has nothing to do with the shooting of McDonald, who was hit in the forearm and recovered from the injury. The sins of one case don't extend to the other.
The McDonald investigation was handled not by Abelove but by Schenectady County District Attorney Robert Carney, whose process was thorough and clear. Grand jurors were presented with analyses of forensic evidence and heard from several witnesses, including McDonald and Iler, who testified without waiving his immunity from prosecution. Jurors sided with Iler, and there's nothing to suggest they were wrong.
We ask police to do an extraordinarily difficult job that sometimes requires they protect themselves as they protect the rest of us. In other words, some officer shootings are entirely justified and to pretend otherwise is stupidity.
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If every officer who fires a gun is subsequently blacklisted, who will want to be a cop? The profession would wither on the vine, if it hasn't already.
After seven years on the force, Iler left Troy police in 2020 and subsequently worked as an officer in Port St. Lucie, Fla., where he was credited for jumping into a lake to save a suicidal woman. Iler recently returned to New York, where Saratoga Springs Commissioner of Public Safety Tim Coll cited his "exceptional experience" and Spanish fluency as reasons to hire him.
Cue the outrage. And a quick change of heart.
"It's not the right place for him here," Coll told me Wednesday. "There are other communities that don't have our issues."
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In Saratoga Springs, elected officials and Black Lives Matter activists have been fighting a zero-sum war. Indeed, a recent report from the state attorney general's office accused former city officials and police of violating protesters' First Amendment rights, arresting them on baloney charges and unlawfully spying on them.
The recent election of Mayor John Safford and Coll suggested voters are exhausted by the acrimony. The hope was that the pair — particularly Safford, who ran emphasizing kindness, civility, compassion and empathy — could calm the storm, especially after a jury cleared city police of wrongdoing in the Darryl Mount Jr. death.
Alas, the plan to hire Iler was like gasoline on simmering flames, as evidenced by Tuesday night's ugly City Council meeting. Given the context and the recent history, the move was the wrong plan at the wrong time — and ultimately unfair to Iler, throwing him into a storm not of his making.
Coll told me he wished the vetting process had happened more quickly and that he takes full responsibility for the controversy. But he wouldn't describe trying to hire Iler as a mistake.
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"His shooting was justified," Coll said. "When police officers do things correctly, they should not be vilified. I think that's the problem in our country right now."
Our country has many problems, but I take Coll's point.
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