Astoria residents once again filled the monthly 114th Precinct Community Council meeting last week to complain about police officers’ reckless chases through the residential, low-crime neighborhood. But this time, the voice of one of the victims was the clearest.
The family of Amanda Servedio, a cyclist killed by a suspected burglary fleeing police officers in a high-speed pursuit, asked that a statement be read that expressed, in all-too-poignant terms, what many in the room felt — and have felt long before her death on Oct. 22.
“We believe Amanda would still be alive if not for the deadly actions of this department and this precinct in particular,” the statement began. It would go on to refer to the shocking data: From Jan. 1 through Sept. 30, 2024, cops from the 114th Precinct engaged in 38 high-speed chases on residential streets — the sixth most chases out of the city's 77 precincts over that period.
And that doesn’t include the chase of a burglary suspect that preceded Servedio’s death — just hours after last month’s community council meeting … at which Astoria residents were also complaining about the 114th Precinct’s recklessness.
“There is no justification for a high-speed chase in a neighborhood like Astoria unless a truly active danger is under way,” the statement continued. “This seems to us like officers who completely disregarded cyclists and pedestrians in their pursuit. We’ve seen the numbers; everybody has. This precinct engages in high speed chases way more than can be justified, and the number of chases has skyrocketed across New York recently.”
This sequence of events on the night of Servedio’s death was particularly horrifying to other speakers because it is the exact tragedy about which the 114th Precinct has been repeatedly warned. Nonetheless, cops sped in pursuit of a burglar suspect in his 4,000-pound Dodge Charger (a vehicle so powerful it arguably has no place in dense cities at all), who then fatally struck the 36-year-old Servedio. The suspect and three accomplices fled on foot and have not been caught.
“What is a burglary?” Rosamond Gianutsos asked the police brass at the meeting. “And what is the worst punishment that could happen to a burglar?”
Another woman, who gave the name Amy and said it was her first time at such a meeting, mocked the priorities of the officers, who had touted recent ticketing of moped riders.
“It’s in fact not moped riders that are killing people, it’s drivers that are killing peoplem,” she said. “Drivers kill about a hundred pedestrians and cyclists a year.” [It is really more like 150.]
Michael Murtha noted that there were only six NYPD pursuits by the 114th Precinct in 2021 and 2022, but 71 in 2023 and so far in 2024, an increase in danger imposed on the community that would be on the front page of every news outlet if it didn’t involve cars or the NYPD.
To almost all of the questions, the police officials offered no solutions, apologies, or understanding.
The crux of the issue is not whether police should never chase, but whether they should chase when there is no imminent threat to the public. This is a distinction that 114th Precinct Commanding officer Deputy Inspector Seth Lynch seems to understand. At one point in the meeting, he responded to a question by reading from the police handbook on the matter: “Department policy requires that a vehicle pursuit be terminated whenever the risk to uniformed members of the service and the public outweigh the danger to the community if a suspect is not immediately apprehended.”
But someone shouted, “How does a burglary fall into that?” After a long silence, the person repeated, “No, seriously, how does a burglary fall into that?” Others also demanded an answer to that question, but none was given.
Lynch is very familiar with Astorians’ complaints about reckless driving by his officers, but also by residents. He’s been hearing it since his first community council meeting in June, where he was bombarded with car-related concerns. The big issue of the day then was the rapidly deteriorating situation on a local greenway, destruction caused entirely by the lack of enforcement on drivers parking cars illegally on the Astoria Greenway. Lynch was initially dismissive of the deleterious effects of cars on the neighborhood, he faced so many questions that his answers started to change as he saw how serious a concern the issue was to residents. Shortly thereafter, the Greenway was cleared, to Lynch's credit. And it has remained so.
This is how community meetings are supposed to work. The local public should act as a check on the non-resident police force. Oftentimes, advocates that attend these meetings develop relationships with the individual police officers, many of whom are committed professionals who want to prevent the deaths we are routinely subjected to. The institution and its habits are the problem.
At the most-recent meeting, I spoke to the officer who was first on the scene after a reckless driver blew a stop sign and ran over and killed 7-year-old Dolma Naadhun. We talked about how we were all traumatized by that death. But from that horrific tragedy came a renewed focus on the problem of dangerous intersections that eventually forced the Adams administration to commit to installing the valuable safety feature known as daylighting.
It remains to be seen if a similar movement against police chases will happen in Astoria and beyond, but one thing is clear: More people in more neighborhoods need to go to their community council meetings to confront the police about their fealty to drivers, whether in uniform or not.
Change, if we're going to have it, isn't going to come from the brass down, it's going to come from the citizens up.
