Patricia Gatling, formerly the Brooklyn First Assistant District Attorney under former Kings County DA Charles Hynes, and Human Rights Commissioner under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sat on the 6th floor terrace of the 59-story AVA DoBro Building in Downtown Brooklyn, and said she is all about criminal justice system, but don’t call her a “progressive.”
“Progressive almost sounds like a party. They took on that term but whose term is it? I mean I guess they don’t like liberal. I hear that and people tell me they’re trying to out left the left. But fundamental fairness is fundamental fairness. That is advocating for the law, the community and what’s important to us as a society,” said Gatling.
Gatling moved to the swank new highrise that includes a dog park cafe a little over three months ago after living in Manhattan for the past 18 years. She bristles when it comes to some of her opponents calling her a “carpetbagger.”
“It’s interesting you know because I worked in Brooklyn for 33 years. I worked in Brooklyn when no one else would even get on the train to come to Brooklyn. I mean I think it’s just a form of criticism. They can’t criticize my credentials, they can’t criticize what I’ve done, I’ve got a track record,” said Gatling.
Gatling sees herself as a “Criminal Justice Reformer,” and sees a broken system she wants to improve starting with the morality of the DA’s office, and making sure to hold all of the staff to a high standard of integrity.
“You know people can make mistakes but integrity mistakes are a big character flaw and that’s a problem. So they will have to understand that those of us who enforce the law are also obligated to follow the law and to be morally responsible. We got to pay our taxes, we can’t take rent supplements that were not entitled to because those are integrity conflicts,” said Gatling.
Gatling will also be looking to take care of union workers and contractual staff in the office and tackling the school-to-prison pipeline that is sending youths into the criminal justice system at a young age.
“We have to clean up our house first. If we aren’t treating our staff well and we aren’t treating each other well then how do can you be expected to deal with the public well,” said Gatling.
Gatling however has had her own integrity tested back in 2014, when she was the Human Rights Commissioner. Public Advocate Letitia James accused Gatling of “overseeing a moribund operation” that hasn’t been aggressive in rooting out discrimination.
This includes being commissioner under Bloomberg, a huge proponent of the ‘stop-and-frisk’ police tactic. A tactic that seemed to target minority groups and black male youths more than any other group, and that U.S. District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin found to be an unconstitutional violation of civil rights in 2013.
Accordingly, James demanded Gatling’s dismissal from Mayor de Blasio for her oversight and lack of condemnation during the stop-and-frisk era of policing. In the end, Gatling was fired.
To this day, Gatling doesn’t agree with how stop-and-frisk was handled but believes that certain strategies become useful tools in the criminal justice system.
“I used stop-and-frisk when I was a prosecutor, but we did not use it as a broad brush enforcement strategy. We used stop-and-frisk when we were identifying gang members. You know it was a useful tool at the time and then people decided to take it to this whole nother level,” said Gatling.
In fact, the former commissioner claims that she has no problems with James and that it was the media who “stirred up” the controversy as she was already one month away from her scheduled leave date.
“I was the last holdover from the Bloomberg Administration with de Blasio, so I had been at that point, been in hold-over for almost a year, in fact it was a year. And there was one more month I had, when she [James] sent that letter in November. Quite frankly she didn’t mention my name, if you read the letter, I think it had to deal more with the politics between her [James] and the Mayor [de Blasio], than it did with me,” said Gatling.
In addition, Gatling is looking to keep the late Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson’s legacy at the forefront of her administration, as she believes the Conviction Review Unit should be expanded going forward.
“I think that it should be expanded upon. I think that it is an integrity unit to a great extent and I think that we need to have community members serving on the unit. Non-lawyers see the world a little differently than lawyers do, it’s all about perspective. I think having community members on the board but also by placing individuals who were wrongfully convicted on the board is very important. For them to be there to review the cases because after all they know better than we know, the places we [District Attorneys] went wrong,” said Gatling.
Also running in the Kings County District Attorney Primary on Sept 12 are interim DA Eric Gonzalez, Ama Dwimo, Anne Swern, Vincent Gentile and Marc Fliedner.
