Inside the New Rochelle Police Department Clown Show — Part V

EDWARD MARTINEZ

On July 18, 2008, Police Officer Edward Martinez informed Lieutenant Gary Robinson of the New Rochelle Police Department Internal Affairs Unit that his off-duty firearm was missing, a Sig Sauer .380 handgun.

Under Chapter 1, Section 1.33 of the New Rochelle Police Department Rules and Regulations, a police officer must immediately notify his Commanding Officer in writing of his loss. Martinez waited until on or about July 18, 2008, to report his loss to Lieutenant Robinson. Martinez’s failure to immediately notify his Commanding Officer in writing of his loss constitutes misconduct.

Martinez pleaded guilty to the charge of misconduct for the failure to report the loss of a firearm immediately in writing to his commanding officer, the penalty of his guilty plea was the loss of five days vacation leave.

The Complete Series (as published so far):

Inside the New Rochelle Police Department Clown Show — Table of Contents

The Clown Show series is a multipart series reporting on New Rochelle Police Department Internal Affairs disciplinary records of current and former members of the department.

We are keeping the comments section closed until the series has run its course, but if you have your own experience with The Clown Show, please share at robertcox@talkofthesound.com or call/text/signal at 914-325-4616. We cannot do much without details like names of officers, dates, locations, so be as specific as you can. Give us a way to reply and follow up.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The NRPD disciplinary records published in our series Inside the New Rochelle Police Department Clown Show were confidential under New York State Law since 1976 when New York State enacted 50-a, a section of the New York Civil Rights Law, which hid disciplinary records of police officers, firefighters, and prison officers from the public. 50-a was repealed by the New York State Legislature and signed into law by New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo on June 12, 2020. On that day, Talk of the Sound made its first request for disciplinary records of New Rochelle Police Department officers, those of PO Alec McKenna. Those records were illegally withheld by the City of New Rochelle and the NRPD. In response, we filed an additional 834 requests based on current and past police department rosters, press releases, award ceremony programs and New York State police pension records obtained from the New York State Office of the State Comptroller. NRPD has claimed that about 200 of those requests are duplicative due to slight variations and discrepancies in how names of officers are recorded by NRPD, NRPD Internal Affairs and the New York State Police and Fire Retirement System. Those 600+ records were illegally withheld by the City of New Rochelle and the NRPD. Production of these records began on March 4, 2021, and continued in fits and starts over the following 8 months. As of the publication date of this article, NRPD had yet to complete production of all requested disciplinary records. For the reasons described above, our “Clown Show” series is reporting on incidents in the past, sometimes the distant past, but our obtaining the records published in this series has only just occurred in recent months, weeks, or days and so while the Internal Affairs charges, investigations and resulting command disciplines are not new the public disclosure of them is new, hence “news”. Most, if not all, of the information contained in these decades of previously secret records is becoming known to the public for the first time through this series.