I saw the police video. It didn’t tell me much I hadn’t gleaned from the initial newspaper reports. Without audio, it’s impossible to know what the police officer and the former judge were saying to one another—although maybe it wouldn’t matter if we had the audio. Whatever the case, it’s hard to tell whether Mike Ryan was victim or perpetrator.
Hard to tell, that is, if one were trying to use the video tape to guess the outcome of the pending charges against Ryan for disorderly conduct and assault on a police officer, to which he has pleaded not guilty. If I had to guess, I’d say that Ryan and his lawyer, Holyoke’s Aaron Wilson, will prevail in a courtroom; it was Ryan and his lawyer, after all, who released the videotape to Northampton Media, an online news outlet, so I assume they think the video is exculpatory. Both Ryan and Wilson, as well as Ryan’s son, defense attorney Luke Ryan, have vast experience in these matters, so, all else being equal, Ryan probably has the edge at trial.
But for many of us who’ve followed the story and watched the video—certainly many who expressed points of view online, in reaction to reports published in the local media—Ryan’s run-in with Northampton police officer Andrew J. Kohl serves as a refresher course in how not to deal with cops. As shown on the video, Kohl and two other NPD officers quickly respond to what appears to be little more than a quick, unexpected jerk of Ryan’s hand toward the officer—he is apparently trying to retrieve his wallet from Kohl—by grabbing the judge, throwing him down on the hood of a car and cuffing him.
Had I been in a similar situation—encountered by police at night, allegedly having had a couple of pops—and made a similar movement toward a police officer, I’d expect to be eating asphalt. I’m not saying the cops would be justified, or that all cops would act exactly the same way. But I believe, right or wrong, that police almost always have the upper hand, and that most respond to even the slightest possible threat quickly and with force.
The saga of retired District Court Judge W. Michael Ryan is big news in and around Northampton—news given legs, no doubt, by Ryan’s video release. Though I’ve paid attention to the story and found it interesting, though I can’t imagine any reporter anywhere feeling obliged not to write about a case of an allegedly drunk former judge getting into a beef with the cops, I’m not sure what lasting value the story really has.
Is it a story that tells us something of Officer Kohl and the other officers there that night? Is it a story that tells us broadly about policing in Northampton, not only about Kohl’s behavior, but about the chain of command that subsequently resisted efforts by local media to obtain a copy of the video?
Or is it mainly a tale about a retired judge who, after a long and distinguished career, effectively rewrites his legacy by failing to keep his cool when a young cop calls him out for unflattering but not necessarily unlawful behavior? Is it about a 64-year-old former judge not wanting to submit to a young man who’d only been a police officer for a few years?
In the end, I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly what happened or why it happened. Ryan provided the public with more information than the NPD or the special prosecutor have provided so far, but Ryan’s is still only a selective view—a video and a written statement to a hyper-local news outlet, but no cross-examination by the reporters to whom he entrusted his release. As the case moves through the system, it is likely that we will see the issues increasingly narrowed by the presiding judge, Robert Calagione of Worcester. The two sides won’t delve into all that happened that night, and therefore won’t attempt to answer the most intriguing questions—did, for example, Kohl know who Ryan was and hold some bias against him or, conversely, did Ryan harbor some resentment against the NPD that influenced his conduct that night?—the case will be carefully limited, treated, despite its famous defendant, as fairly routine.
That, of course, is the Catch 22 here: The Ryan case isn’t routine, for if it were, we wouldn’t be reading about it in newspapers. While it is routine for police to charge people with disorderly conduct and assault and battery on a police officer, only such cases involving celebrity defendants get the level of public scrutiny that this case is getting. While Ryan has said that it grieves him to be “criticized and censured” by his neighbors, he is also lucky to have his neighbors watching blind justice at work.
