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Red Boat, White Snow, Blue Flu

As the St. Patrick’s Day parade crawled through the Valley, across the windswept Elk Street bridge and into the snow-covered Old First Ward last Saturday, it was fronted by two Buffalo police cruisers, their lights turning—single occupancy, of course. A contingent of police officers followed many blocks later on foot. “I thought you had the flu,” a parade watcher shouted to the driver of one car, at the corner of O’Connell and Tennessee. “I got better,” the cop said wanly.

Most everyone got better, as it turned out. In the three weeks before the parade, Mayor Byron Brown and Police Commissioner H. McCarthy Gipson were smooth as ducks on the water, pretending publicly that the threat of a police sickout last weekend—during the drunken St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in South Buffalo and downtown, while the NCAA basketball tournament drew 80,000 visitors to HSBC Arena—were idle rumors, with no more weight than previous grumblings. But they were paddling like mad beneath the surface to prevent the sickout. Gipson toured the district headquarters, alternately imploring and castigating his troops. Pressure was exerted through special squads: The Underwater Recovery Team was told a job action would squash the promise of a new boat and eliminate overtime opportunities; members of the SWAT team were told that they’d be removed from the squad if they took part.

Probably most effectively, according to one officer, a nine-year veteran who asked to remain anonymous, cops were told that a job action might undermine next Saturday’s benefit at the Convention Center for Officer Patricia Parete, recovering from gunshot wounds that have left her paralyzed. Many agreed, and so the sickout was canceled. Only a handful of officers, mostly in D District, called in sick over the weekend—fewer, probably, than usually do during the average St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Many took personal days instead, according to two anonymous police officers, fearing the consequences of calling in sick. In the days before the looming sickout, the city’s lawyers had obtained a temporary restraining order against any officers participating in an illegal job action. Twenty-two officers who did call in sick have been served subpoenas by the city’s Corporation Counsel to appear in State Supreme Court on Friday, where they will have to prove that they were in fact sick and not on strike. (The anonymous nine-year veteran said one of the officers subpoenaed is, in fact, recovering from cancer; another took a sick day to care for her hospitalized mother; a third took photos of her own vomit to bring to court on Friday.) The subpoenas, needless to say, have not helped to boost morale among an already disgruntled force.

On Tuesday, Niagara District Councilman Nick Bonifacio presented commendations to Parete and her partner, Officer Carl Andolina, who was less seriously wounded in the incident that left Parete paralyzed. Andolina had previously told Bonifacio that he wouldn’t accept any commendations for his actions that day until Parete could stand beside him. He relented, however, and later in Tuesday’s Common Council session Bonifacio urged an end to the contract stalemate that has driven wedges between the Brown administration, the control board, the police union, the officers themselves and the public. To start with, Bonifacio said, the control board and the administration should find a way to honor the police contract that he and the rest of the Comon Council had approved in 2003. “I’m a man of honor,” he said, “and I think we should honor that contract.”

The fundraiser for Parete, Council President Dave Franczyk predicted, may prove to be the largest outpouring of support for a Buffalo cop in the city’s history. If true, that alone will have been worth canceling the sickout. But, in the meantime, Buffalo police will continue to fume. The URT will continue to work overtime to make up for the pay raises they were promised and never got, and they may even get a nice new boat to showcae in next year’s parade.

The URT’s new boat surely will be nicer than the red launch the Bouquard family tows in the St. Patrick’s Day parade each year, a model they rent for $10 an hour at their slip on Fuhrmann Boulevard, which they have operated for something like 100 years—and where on a summer weekend you’ll find the Bouquards, their children and all their little Bouquard dogs picnicking by the lake. On the other hand, the URT’s new boat probably will not be as nice as the Erie County Sheriff Department’s Hummer or seldom-used bomb squad van that followed after the Bouquards’ red launch in the parade.