Moments after announcing earlier this month that he will be stepping down, Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch, who has been the face of New York's largest police union for the last quarter century, passed a symbolic baton to the officer he hopes will succeed him. Patrick Hendry, who is currently the PBA's treasurer, took the podium at a union event to accept the endorsement and walked off to a standing ovation from members.
But in what will be the first open race for PBA president this millennium, there’s a challenge to the union establishment’s chosen heir. Corey Grable, the PBA’s financial secretary for transit and the only other declared candidate, started campaigning for the job months before Lynch’s announcement.
If elected, he’d be the first Black president of an organization that has long had overwhelmingly white leadership. As recently as the mid-1990s, the PBA’s executive council was entirely white. Even today, the top leaders of all five NYPD unions are white.
By contrast, the NYPD is now 57% non-white, and Grable’s candidacy represents increasing diversity of law enforcement leadership in the city beyond union ranks. The police commissioner, mayor (a former police captain), and three of the city's five district attorneys are people of color.
“I think it would be significant in the sense that you have an African American in a leadership role in representing the interests of New York City police officers,” said Keith Taylor, a former officer who was a PBA member in the early 1990s and now teaches Africana Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
But, Taylor said, race won’t necessarily factor into how officers vote. “I think the priority interests for officers will be: ‘Who is going to represent my financial interests? And secondarily, who is going to give me the best defense against administrative or criminal accusations of wrongdoing?’”
Grable, 54, said in an interview with Gothamist that his race is irrelevant to the job at hand. “The ethnicity or the color of my skin has nothing to do with me as the candidate,” he said.
“The reality is that the issues that affect police officers, mainly compensation and the way the public treats cops and the way cops are perceived, I think that goes beyond race,” he said. “I think we need a personality as president who can foster and build bridges, but that can be a person of any race.”
Nationally, according to a 2020 analysis by the Marshall Project, of the 15 largest police departments in the country in which a majority of the officers were people of color, only one had a Black union boss. Yet union leaders regularly engage in issues related to race, from defending aggressive police suppression of Black Lives Matter protests to protecting white cops accused of wrongly killing Black people.
Where a Black leader could make a difference is in the type of rhetoric that unions use, Taylor said. “What you would not have if Grable were to become PBA president, is have criminals described as mutts ... because those have racial overtones,” Taylor said. Lynch used that word at least once to describe a 16-year-old Black suspect. “When I first joined 30 years ago, it was common for that kind of incendiary language to be used,” Taylor said.
Then there are the optics, Taylor said. With a Black leader of the PBA, criticism of officers for not being “considerate or representative of minority communities’ interest'' might be muted, he said.
Police unions’ “soft power” has traditionally been about using their bully pulpit when media seek comment about rank-and-file officers’ opinions, said Jorge Camacho, policy director for the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. He previously worked as an adviser on public safety issues for New York City.
“What they have been doing is using their position as an advocate on behalf of police officers to promote an increasingly politicized agenda when it comes to policing,” he said. So even if individual officers might support certain reform measures, unions generally oppose progressive changes in law enforcement under the premise “that if you give into one thing, it will lead to more things that could very potentially be more harmful to the interests of police officers,” he said.
But without a leader “in the mold of the brash loudmouth New York City politician in the way that Pat Lynch was,” Camacho said, “it’s very conceivable to see a very different PBA under a different kind of leadership, although one that still is going to be expected to be a dogged advocate of its union membership.”
Two different candidates
Soon after Lynch announced he would not run for re-election, Grable released a statement saying he was disappointed that Lynch "put his thumb on the scale" by choosing a preferred successor.
“The men and women of the NYPD are desperate for new leadership, and we must make sure they will not be subjected to more of the same," he said.
Grable, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, said he was inspired to get involved in the union after a shooting in the mid-1990s. While working patrol as a transit officer, in an attempt to thwart someone from attacking a victim with a knife he said he fired his weapon, injuring the alleged perpetrator and a bystander.
“When you’re a relatively new officer, this kind of incident can become very overwhelming,” he said. “You start contemplating whether the DA’s office is going to come and arrest you.”
Instead, Grable recalled that his union delegate at the time “put his hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘Kid, you’re going to be OK.’” Grable said the help he received in navigating the aftermath of that incident inspired him to get involved in the union.
He now resides in Queens, unlike Hendry, who lives in Suffolk County, according to public records. Roughly half of the NYPD’s 36,000 officers live outside New York City, according to police data from 2020. A fundraiser for Hendry last week was held in Nassau County.
Hendry did not respond to numerous calls and emails seeking an interview.
Patrick Hendry shakes the hand of a uniformed officer.
Only a few days after Lynch introduced him as his desired successor, Hendry began acting the part, walking directly behind the wheelchair of an injured officer as he was greeted with a hero’s ovation upon release from the hospital — a role Lynch has traditionally played.
Hendry has campaigned for the position by touring precincts and speaking to officers at their daily roll calls, according to his campaign’s social media account.
At the 103rd Precinct in Jamaica, Queens, which he once represented as a union delegate, he stressed that if elected he would make use of the media much like his predecessor did: “I will be your voice when you don’t have one. When you pick up the paper in the morning, when you read online, you’re going to see me in it, fighting for you.“
But Hendry has yet to speak in the dramatic intonations that made Lynch such a magnet for cameras and audio soundbites – a tactic that Grable has openly criticized.
“When you start building relationships and building up trust, that’s how you get things done,” Grable said. “Sometimes screaming – there might be a need for that at some point – but you can’t scream all the time. And more importantly, in recent years, that hasn’t worked.”
The winner of the race has implications far beyond the interests of the PBA's 50,000 active and retired officers. Unions are the largest interest group opposing many criminal justice reforms intended to reduce incarceration, like bail reform and increased oversight.
The PBA is well-funded. It brought in more than $28 million in 2020, according to tax filings, and is a major campaign donor to city and state legislators on both sides of the aisle. The union has largely been successful in protecting officers from greater disciplinary action and firing over charges of police brutality. On the campaign trail, Grable has argued that the PBA needs to push back even harder on officers being “overly disciplined.”
“The public need to understand that the unions are a professional organization and the rights and due process of the employees — in this case police officers — need to be protected at all costs,” Grable said.
The PBA will elect its new president in June.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Keith Taylor's name.
