NEW YORK(FinalCall.com)–You could hear the relief in Yvette Walton’s voice. Also, there was a trace or two of exultation upon hearing on Veteran’s Day that the city had agreed to settle her lawsuit. The settlement from the Police Department is $327,500, plus legal fees, said her lawyer Christopher Dunn of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Mrs. Walton, a former officer who sued the city after she was fired for criticizing the police department following the shooting of Amadou Diallo in February 1999, will be reinstated and then be allowed to retire and draw her pension.
“I’m glad it’s over, and I feel vindicated,” Mrs. Walton said in a Nov. 12 evening telephone interview from her home in upstate New York. “I think the turning point came with the new administration. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had said that he wanted a clean slate and to settle all the outstanding cases. This may have been the thing that turned it all around.”
Another critical point, Mrs. Walton continued, may have been the decision of Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who ruled last winter that the police department had acted improperly. “He said they were wrong in what they did,” Mrs. Walton added.
It was the wrongs of the Street Crime Unit–Mrs. Walton was the only Black female in the 150-member unit–that precipitated the whole ordeal. She said she had grown increasingly upset with the unit’s civil rights abuses and the excessive racial profiling, when she donned a disguise to testify against it in April 1999. Her action was further prompted months earlier when Amadou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea was shot 19 times by four police officers outside his door in the Bronx. The officers, who said they thought Mr. Diallo was reaching for a gun rather than his wallet, were tried and then acquitted.
Mr. Diallo’s murder outraged countless citizens and sparked dissent throughout the nation. “He could have been my son,” Walton said at the time of her action against the Street Crimes Unit.
“I’m not sure if the Street Crime Unit still exists,” Mrs. Walton, 42, said when asked of her former colleagues. “I have not been in touch with any of them or with other officers.” A former Harlemite who grew up in the Lincoln Projects, she worked in the unit from 1993-95 and received a number of commendations.
After Mrs. Walton’s move to breach the blue wall of silence in one television appearance and before members of the City Council, the police department, according to her defense counsel, began a campaign of retribution, including dismissing her on the grounds that she was “not a credit to the department,” said then Police Commissioner Howard Safir, and that she had failed to check into work while on sick leave.
Judge Hellerstein agreed that Mrs. Walton had been dismissed for exercising her First Amendment rights. The promised appeal from the city never came, and Mrs. Walton suggests, may have been abandoned once Mayor Bloomberg took office.
And what has she been doing since her 12-year police career came to an end? “I’ve been going to nursing school at a college in Orange County,” she said. She has also been spending a lot more time with her three children, two of whom are still at home and one now away at college. “I plan to go back and finish up my courses toward a degree as a registered nurse.”
Mrs. Walton also has a sizable settlement to nurse, though she said she has made no plans for the money. “Probably spend most of it on my family,” she laughed.