Local Man Works To Improve Police-Community Relations
June 18, 2009
These days, Carlos Baez is the Sergeant at Arms of the 48th Precinct’s Community Council, the civilian board charged with fostering dialogue between cops and residents. At council meetings, he sits up front, clearly relishing the job, and greeting individual officers warmly. Speak to him afterwards, and he will preach the virtues of the Citizen’s Police Academy and the importance of building mutual understanding between community residents and the precinct.
“I try to make it my business for the community to interact more with the precinct, and I try to get the precinct to interact more with the community,” said Baez, a stocky, voluble man, who has lived in Bathgate for 25 years. “I want people to know we have to work with the police, not against the police.”
But Baez wasn’t always an evangelist for better police-community relations.
“[I] didn’t like police. I’m gonna admit it. I didn’t like ‘em,” Baez said recently, incongruous words for a man sitting in his living room beneath a pair of framed photographs of himself with Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
A former gang-member, Baez served time in prison on drug charges. In 1994, his cousin, Anthony Baez, then 29, was asphyxiated by a police officer after his football hit a squad car. The incident became one of the most notorious cases of police brutality in Bronx history.
”I used to think that cops were just hit men with badges and guns, credentials to kill,” Baez said.
But at crucial moments in his life, he says, it was cops who were there to see him through.
In 1991 Baez’s younger son, then 15, was hit and killed by a car. In 1996, Baez’s oldest son, only 19, was killed, a victim of gang violence.
“I kinda like lost it,” Baez said. “I was – crazy. And two officers, two police officers brought me back to reality.”
Zoltan Karpati and his partner Felix Ramos, then detectives with the 48th precinct, met Baez soon after his elder son had been killed. Karpati in particular took an interest in Baez.
A detective for 24 years with the NYPD, Karpati, who retired last year, said of Baez, “I knew he was begging for some kind of guidance. I felt that he wasn’t a lost cause, and he wasn’t.”
“I was going on a downhill spiral, and he just brought me back up and told me that life was worth living,” Baez said of Karpati.
For Baez, Karpati’s intervention offered more than a lifeline after the loss of his sons; it opened the door to a new life. “I wasn’t a nice guy,” Baez said. “God put him in my way to show me that God and life is good.”
Baez decided to study to become a chaplain, and in 2005 he was ordained. He and his brother founded an organization, the Chaplains Workers Federation. The seven chaplains in Baez’s chapter, including his wife, Angelica, speak at schools about gang violence, and at churches about immigrants’ rights and domestic violence.
His new lifestyle, however, and even his friendship with Karpati, hadn’t convinced Baez to drop his suspicion of cops as a whole. Three years ago, when Baez started attending the meetings of the 48th Precinct’s Community Council, he went to vent. There he came to the attention of Community Affairs Officer Melanie Kujawinski, who thought she saw a good candidate for the Citizen’s Police Academy, a 15-week course which offers civilians a training similar to that for police recruits.
For Baez, it was an eye-opener – and a nudge that set him on the right path.
“It actually turned my whole life around,” Baez said. “I started seeing things in a different perspective… They don’t have an easy job.”
Particularly searing was an exercise on a firearms simulator, which puts participants through situations in which they’re required to shoot – or hold back. Baez emerged from the simulator convinced he had taken just one shot. In fact, he had taken 9. “That’s the state of mind most of these cops are in when they shoot they’re guns,” he said.
“Not all the officers that are out there are bad people. They’re just human beings,” Baez said. “They got faults, they make mistakes.”
Now Baez says his most important role is as a link between the precinct and the community.
“He’s like an ambassador,” said Karpati. “If we have a problem or the community has a problem, we reach out to him.”
On occasion, when the police have searched for someone who was afraid or reluctant to turn themselves in, the suspect has come to Baez and he escorted them to the station. “People who are wanted, they come to me because they know my word is bond – it means that they know they will not be roughed up and will be treated fairly,” Baez said.
The role, too, requires asking more of the police. The 48th Precinct does a good job, he said. But things could be much better.
“You still got cops that don’t know how to talk to people,” he said. “They have to feel out the neighborhood, they have to know the people in the neighborhood. What’s wrong with them coming around, going into the businesses, and just saying hello, how’s everything? When I was growing up, we knew the cops’ names.”
At the end of the day, Baez says, his message is simple: “The precinct can’t do it by itself, and neither can the community. We have to work together in order to make this work.”
By RACHEL WALDHOLZ
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