Deja Vu All Over Again

The red-eye flew in from LAX to JFK in time for me to glimpse from the cab on the way into Manhattan the fragments of doomsday-sized headlines, something about a man being beaten and tortured by four NYPD cops.

First I thought of the line, and then of the man who had said it, Yogi Berra, malaprop manager and onetime catcher for the Yankees, a New York baseball team: “It’s deja vu all over again.”

Well, it is, and it isn’t.

Rodney King and Abner Louima are two black men involved in brutal conflicts with white police officers of the nation’s two biggest cities. But where do the parallels run from there?

Rodney King, jollied up by malt liquor, led cops from a panoply of agencies on a merry chase on and off the freeway, and wound up beaten and Tasered by cops hopped up from the pursuit. He had a broken cheekbone and ankle, 11 broken bones at the base of his skull, and needed 20 stitches. It was all witnessed by other officers, by passing cars and even a bus, and by a man with a video camera.

Six years later, Abner Louima was arrested during a fight outside a Haitian nightclub and then allegedly beaten by police; what happened to him after was in cooler blood, and in private--a bathroom of the 70th Precinct, where the wooden handle of a toilet plunger was allegedly forced up his rectum and then into his mouth. Three hours later, he was taken to the hospital with intestinal and bladder injuries and broken teeth.

The men accused of the outrages--four on this coast, four on that one--wore the uniforms of police departments that are even now searching for new standards of conduct, new ways to do the job without overdoing it, and perhaps moving, like the edges of the universe, in opposite directions.

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Reputations matter.

LAPD’s was of a straight-arrow department that, as the Johnny Carson deadpan crack went, wouldn’t take tips during traffic stops. New York’s finest, so the tales went, palmed an apple or a bribe with an equally light heart. The NYPD were the guys who would rather hang back out of harm’s way, then go in with a pencil instead of a gun; the LAPD were the guns-blazing, camera-ready men who called you “sir” right up until they shot you.

The style got each of them into trouble, one way or another.

The NYPD was, to use a California-ism, too laid back; crime went up, and the middle class leached out of New York. The LAPD was deemed too heavy-handed, sweating the small stuff, the loitering/drinking/urinating transgressions that fall on the young or idling, who came to see it as harassment.

On an August night in 1965, the same enforcement principle was at work when a CHP officer stopped a drunken black driver in front of a gathering, querulous crowd--and thus began the Watts riots.

Aggressive policing earned the LAPD a rep in black and brown parts of town as an occupying force, bent on stopping crime by taking out criminals aborning for offenses however petty, on the same principle that one toke of marijuana leads to heroin.

The tensions of the 1960s were little improved in the 1980s, when cops shot more people and were shot at more often. Driven out by high prices and high crime, by bad schools and worse neighborhoods, they patrolled a city they no longer lived in.

Then an ex-con named Rodney King became the epiphany, the video watershed, from which all else flowed: Christopher Commission reforms, community policing, Gates to Williams to Parks.

We see a different LAPD today, with fewer arrests, fewer brutality complaints, less crime--although not as dramatic a drop as in New York--and for manifold reasons: cops who don’t want to risk getting “beefed,” fewer criminal-age people in the demographic pipeline, and a public that’s had it up to here with casual, volatile killers whose weapons can make 100 holes a minute.

And it is the NYPD, the slackers, who are kicking butt with the zero-tolerance policing that won the LAPD its hard-ass reputation, rousting drug vendors and pushy panhandlers and street corner louts to the cheers of neighbors. Even liberals love what has happened in the city, and may prove it by reelecting Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in November.

Deja vu all over again: New York today might be a Mobius strip for Los Angeles, a past and future drawn endlessly on the same twisting line.

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The only man who could remotely find solace in a newspaper story naming one of the 70th Precinct Four as “perhaps the most despised cop in America” is Mark Fuhrman.

Mark Fuhrman is, implicitly, “the old LAPD.” The new LAPD strives to look more like the city it patrols; significantly, one of New York’s first official acts post-Abner Louima was to sweep dozens of white officers out of the 70th Precinct and replace them with black and brown cops. No one has yet determined whether a truer justice lies in getting arrested by someone whose skin color you share.

The men accused of the outrages wore the uniforms of police departments that are even now searching for new standards of conduct, new ways to do the job without overdoing it.