New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani insists that the shocking case of Abner Louima is isolated. The mayor is in deep denial and his denial only encourages more abuses.
Louima, a 30-year-old Haitian immigrant and part-time security guard, was gravely injured inside a New York City police station on Aug. 9. One or more police officers sodomized him with a stick reported to be a toilet-plunger handle. Then the stick was jammed into his mouth, breaking his teeth.
There is a lesson here for the rest of the nation. In response to the national uproar, the mayor took admirable steps, including a full investigation and town hall meetings between residents and every one of the city’s police officers. But if the mayor had paid more attention to the systemic nature of the problem, he might not now find himself searching for systemic solutions.
Until Louima, Giuliani dismissed calls to crack down on complaints of police misconduct. He argued that the complaints are the result of more arrests and his more assertive “zero-tolerance” assault on quality-of-life offenses.
His pride was showing. Giuliani had become the nation’s most prominent advocate of the “broken windows” approach to preventive policing. The nickname comes from a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, which later was expanded into a book titled “Fixing Broken Windows.”
Its basic tenets are increased physical presence of police on the streets and a reduced tolerance for vagrants, graffiti, broken windows and turnstile jumping. When left unfixed, these early signs of incivility lead to more serious social decay, the authors assert.
Such aggressive policing has helped crime to drop to 30-year lows in New York City (and most other major cities) during the three Giuliani years–a drop that former Mayor David Dinkins is quick to point out began during his administration in 1992.
But Big Apple glee has come at a cost to civil rights and liberties. The New York Times, among other publications, recently featured profiles on middle-class New Yorkers of all races forced to spend a night in jail without charges on petty offenses in the name of zero-tolerance policing. Civilian complaints against police for excessive force rose by 61.9 percent in 1995 compared with complaints filed in 1993. Abuse of police authority allegations soared by 86.2 percent. Allegations of illegal searches soared by 135 percent.
Dinkins, writing in the Aug. 26 Village Voice, argues that aggressive policing is not the cause of increased complaints. Most of the complaints “come from people who were not only not arrested, but not even ticketed,” he writes. “Clearly, complainants are largely innocent bystanders who get caught up in illegal police behavior.”
Louima claimed that one of the police shouted, “It’s Giuliani time, not Dinkins time” while attacking him. With that, the story became deeply partisan and political. Many believed the alleged statement to be a reference to Giuliani’s get-tough attitude toward crime, compared to Dinkins, who outraged many cops by instituting a civilian review board for police misconduct complaints.
Giuliani’s critics assert that the numbers would have soared even more, had so many citizens not lost faith in the review board whose staff Giuliani tried to slash, before the City Council blocked him.
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Is there a middle ground between runaway criminals and runaway police? There is, but too often it is ignored in the heat of talk-show arguments and political disputes.
Brutality cases like Louima’s unfortunately polarize the issue between middle-class suburbanites who are angry and frightened of crime and low-income urban residents who catch most of the bad end of police who behave like occupying troops. That’s tragic because poor people are most often the victims of crime and have the greatest reason to cooperate with police in crime-fighting efforts.
That’s what Kelling, the Rutgers University professor who helped develop the broken-windows idea, and his crime scholar partner Wilson had in mind all along, he recently told Time magazine. “Zero tolerance and `sweeps’ are not part of my vocabulary,” he said. Rather, he said, his concept should be carried out in the context of a larger strategy of community policing, in which cops are encouraged to get out of their squad cars and involve themselves with community problems.
That comprehensive approach–getting in touch, not just getting tough–has worked to reduce crime, along with police misconduct complaints, in cities across the country. Los Angeles, whose aggressive policing became notorious in the Rodney King beating case, revamped its training and found, lo and behold, crime went down.
So, yes, it is Giuliani time. It is time for Giuliani, among others, to send a new message to his police, a message that aggressive policing should work with local residents, not war with them.