Letter To The Editor: Hyer, McConville And Police Brutality

To the Editor:

On February 8th , a podcast titled “Police Off the Cuff” aired, featuring candidate for Putnam County Sheriff Kevin McConville and candidate for town council of Kent Robert Hyer. This podcast, which is co-hosted by two former NYPD detectives, lasted over an hour.

Within the first few minutes, Robert Hyer reflected on his early life growing up in Queens, which he dubbed “so bad” because he was “literally the only white person”. He went on to recall how he moved his daughter up to Putnam County to enroll her in a “regular suburban school” because he feared for her safety since she “looked like a model” and would have been “eaten alive” by the students he talked about as if they were animals at a zoo in Queens.

Co-host Demayo asked candidate Kevin McConville if Putnam County had much crime. When McConville began to cite an article explaining why there’s actually not much crime here, Demayo interrupted to say, “Let me guess…. it’s all white people”. Instead of calling out this racist statement for what it is, McConville casually laughed along.

McConville and Robert Hyer continued this back-and-forth, casually racist exchange for the next hour, while all four officers reminisced about the times when they were allowed to brutally attack civilians, with Robert Hyer recalling an incident in which his colleagues broke out Louisville sluggers and mounted police rode into a theater to deal with some “mutts” by “playing polo with these guys’ heads”.

McConville also recounted his experience with supposed rioters in Putnam County, stating the “we stopped them”, we “ran them over.”

These two candidates’ celebration of police brutality is dangerous and should not be tolerated within Putnam. The insurrection of January 6 th taught us that angry crowds are easily provoked and capable of violence under bad leadership, which can lead to death. For this reason, Kevin McConville should never be allowed to be in a position of power in Putnam County and Robert Hyer should never become an elected official in the town of Kent.

Sincerely,

Joelle DePaola

Town of Southeast