In NYPD, ‘Get Tough’ Meant ‘Get Rough’

Police who torture their captives don’t merit sympathy, but if anything could make me feel some pity for the accused New York cops, it’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Here’s the man who’s been amping up “New York’s finest” year after year, mandating them to make life intolerable for vagrants, ambulant teens, black people. Here’s the man screaming for results, exulting in the supposed revolution in policing inaugurated in his term, basking in all the glory-hallelujah articles in the press about the falling crime stats.

And now, when Giuliani’s ravings down the years allow some pervert in Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct to use policing techniques as taught in the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Ga., now we have the mayor announcing, “If you really understand what it means to be a police officer, if you really understand what it means to protect the lives of other people, then you will be among the most revulsed and repulsed by what happened here. If you don’t understand that, then you really should leave the police department.”

Giuliani’s antics remind me of the Pentagon’s, back when the massacre at My Lai surfaced and it turned out that U.S. infantrymen had stood 550 Vietnamese men, women and children in a trench and machine-gunned them over the course of four or five hours. The Pentagon put Capt. Ernest Medina and Lt. William Calley on trial and called it a day, even though, through all those hours of killing, the high command that had ordered the massacre was circling the killing site at 1,500 feet.

It’s not known whether the toilet plunger used to torture Abner Louima has been found, but you can be sure that the prints on it won’t belong only to the prime suspect, officer Justin Volpe.

Police forces reflect the values of the people who call the shots. So on the toilet plunger you have Giuliani’s dabs. You also have the prints of all those mad-dog criminologists, like James Q. Wilson or John DiIulio, who have been promoting “toughness” for decades. Giuliani was particularly edgy about Louima’s statement that one of the cops torturing him said, “This is Giuliani time, not Dinkins time,” as he shoved the plunger handle up the Haitian’s rectum.

Well, it was Giuliani time. As the get-tough policy began to warm up, the stats soared. In 1993, there were 3,400 complaints of police brutality brought before the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York. In 1994, 4,900. In 1995, 5,612. In 1996, 5,592. That’s a 60% increase in three years. It’s true the numbers went down 20% in the first six months of this year, but some argue that this is because people, noting the toothlessness of the board, have given up complaining. There’s some evidence for that, too. Only 4.5% of complaints ever get substantiated, and only 1% of cops facing a substantiated complaint ever get disciplined. As for racism, about half of all complainers are black, way above their demographic weight.

Are the cops stressed, some of them to the level that they become torturers? Of course they’re stressed, by the demand that they deliver the stats that will reelect Giuliani.

Norman Siegel of the New York Civil Liberties Union said the other day he reckoned that maybe 6% of the 38,000 or so New York cops are “bad.” Under certain conditions, 90% of any group can be bad. When professor Philip Zimbardo set up a fake prison at Stanford in the 1960s, the experiment had to be suspended after three days because student “guards” had already started torturing student “prisoners.”

Circumstances, stresses, not to mention direct orders and indirect exhortations, can create monsters. The day before the Louima case broke, the New York Times ran a story about an Argentine military torturer being assaulted by some of his former victims who’d spied him in public. He and other officers in his cohort felt aggrieved. After all, they had only been following orders. Why weren’t their commanding officers catching the heat?

Those cops in Brooklyn were following orders, the same as Calley and his men. In the rhetoric of repression, an order is always a little more than an order. There are always some lines to read between, things the supervisor will not directly say, will always deny, but which he expects to be done. Back to the murder of Thomas  Becket and beyond, world history is littered with inquests, commissions of inquiry, war crime tribunals, courts martial nervously picking at the questions: Who gave the orders? What did the orders mean?

No, of course Giuliani didn’t say, “Take a Haitian into the john and torture him.” He just wanted a pacification program, the same way the instigators of My Lai did. And as always happens, the pacifiers, the latent perverts, the threshold psychopaths knew they had the green light.