Is NYPD covering up for cop who threatened reporter with rape, or letting random dude pretend to be cop?

According to Radley Balko at Reason, NYPD says this asshole who claims to be a cop while threatening a citizen reporter with jail rape is actually not one of their employees.

As readers point out:

Well if he isn’t a cop, then isn’t assuming the authority of an officer, threatening people with arrest and ordering people to disperse under that authority illegal in and of itself. I somehow doubt the uniformed officer in the video would be ok with some random drunk impersonating a police officer.

And

Fine. Who is the uniformed cop who either:
1. Allowed the undercover cop from wherever to threaten people with rape.
or
2. Allowed a non-cop to impersonate an officer.

I’m not sure I really understand how some random guy is supposedly impersonating a police detective on camera in full view of several uniformed officers on a call. Can anyone help me with that?

paulie

Paulie Cannoli: Paulie was born in Siberia, part of the former USSR in 1972 and the USA is reminding him more of the country his parents took him out of every day. Growing up in the epicenter of the 1980s crack cocaine explosion in NYC, Paulie got caught up in the available business ventures and saw some of his friends die, and then became an activist against the drug war.Through his involvement in the drug peace movement, and college studies in free market environmentalism, he became interested in libertarianism, and abandoned the Democrats after they picked the military-industrial-corporate-statist DLCer and drug warrior hypocrite Bill Clinton as their nominee in 1992, thus finally disproving the idea that 60s radicals were merely infiltrating the establishment in order to change it.Paulie became an LP member in 1995 and a life member in 2000, and has occasionally been on the executive committee of the Alabama LP. Since 1998, he has traveled the country as a professional activist. Between that and his earlier travels in the import-export business as a teenager, he has been to 49 US states and about 20 countries, and lived in a number of them. As a life long entrepreneur, he has also started hundreds of businesses in a wide variety of fields.Paulie recently worked on the Steve Kubby for President campaign, has been an active member of the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, is an advisory board member of Liberty Consulting, and hopes to start a new national College Libertarian Organizing Committee.He is an Anti-war, true leftist, anarchist, left libertarian, agorist, (r)evolutionary.More info here.