Police, University Officials Faulted in Fatal Stampede

A task force of top city officials reported Wednesday that university officers abdicated their responsibility to supervise arrangements last month for a celebrity basketball game featuring rap music stars, and that police waited too long to try to stop a stampede in which nine people were crushed to death.

The panel, appointed by Mayor David N. Dinkins the day after the tragedy, called the judgment of police commanders at the scene “highly questionable” and criticized the response of New York City’s Emergency Medical Service.

And, the panel said, many in the crowd exercised “irresponsible and inexcusable behavior,” showing “a total disregard for one’s fellow men and women. The lack of consideration for their fellow human beings by those seeking to attend the event undoubtedly was a significant cause of the tragedy.”

The Dec. 28 stampede had left a host of unanswered questions.

Many victims had the air squeezed out of them in a narrow stairwell of the Nat Holman Gymnasium when the crowd tried to push into the basketball game. As some fans were dying in the nightmarish crush on the Manhattan campus of City College of New York, others were still pressing forward, seeking autographs.

“It is clear now that these were deaths that were unnecessary and avoidable,” Dinkins said at a news conference. “. . . Fundamentally, the report illustrates the complete avoidability of the deaths and injuries . . . . Had there not been a cumulative and interrelated breakdown of responsibility of almost everyone involved, those nine young people would not have been killed, and dozens of others would not have been injured.”

The investigators, headed by Milton Mollen, deputy mayor for public safety, said the board of trustees of the city university system exercised minimal supervision of the colleges’ rules and regulations covering student events.

It said the game’s promoter spent little time preparing and delegated most--if not all--arrangements to people who had no experience in such matters.

“There was an abysmal failure of responsibility on the part of many involved in various aspects of the event leading to the fateful disaster,” Mollen said in a letter to Dinkins.

Mollen called for better communication between police and ambulance dispatchers and charged that the Emergency Medical Service ignored an early call that “people are dying.”

“Although specific information regarding the location and type of emergency was not available at this time, a unit should have been dispatched to the area” Mollen wrote.

The panel called for a host of changes, including better coordination between city agencies.