On June 3, The NY Times reported that Charles Hynes, former district attorney of Brooklyn, is facing charges of larceny. He apparently pilfered funds accrued from the proceeds of criminal activities, like drug busts, that are earmarked for law enforcement activities. It is alleged that Hynes directed these funds to his unsuccessful campaign for re-election. This turn of events has karma written all over it, since it was Hynes’s office that presided over and sustained close to one hundred wrongful convictions. That his office made David McCallum suffer for almost thirty years is bad enough. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t be expecting to see Hynes locked up any too soon, what with the raft of lawyers he’ll be able to retain. I can hear all the testimonials to his accomplishments as the chief law enforcement officer in Brooklyn. The lackeys and yes men, some of whom will also be implicated, must be looking over their shoulders.
This case points to the folly of allowing people to run offices for decades, until such time as they equate themselves with the good of the office. Hynes no doubt believed that without him the office would suffer. His campaign, maybe financed in part by the proceeds of crime, attempted to discredit Ken Thompson as being too inexperienced. Hynes probably told himself that the money he was taking would serve law enforcement. How disgusting and hypocritical! I’d like to see him spend thirty days in one of his beloved prisons, maybe a few months on Rikers Island as well.
Another issue presents itself here, irrespective of Charles ‘Joe’ Hynes. To allow funds garnered from crime to finance a public office is an invitation to corruption. Why should law enforcement be financed in this way? The New Yorker reported that in some southern states and in the midwest, police departments are so underfunded that they rely on both drug arrests and false arrests to sustain themselves. The underfunding of police departments, schools, hospitals, and public institutions in general is the result of the tax hatred that has been perpetrated by right wing political ‘think tanks’ in the USA and Canada. If taxes are seen as too high or unnecessary or ‘job killers’, so the thinking goes, there would be more for the rest of us if we got rid of them. The truth is that there is more for the wealthy and less for the rest of us. For example, when the public school system deteriorates, people spend large sums of money for private school education. Or when colleges and universities lack funding, tuition fees are extortionate. But the wealthy make so much from tax cuts that the increase in fees for these things are less than negligible for them. Hynes would never have had access to a slush fund if police departments were adequately supported. If he is guilty as charged, however, inadequate funding doesn’t make him less reprehensible.