The Price of Safety in a Police State

The newest thing to talk about in New York is upholstery. Everyone is talking about the city buses. A few lucky passengers have had the sumptuous, almost European experience of sitting on actual upholstery on a New York City bus. OK, the upholstery is blue buzz-cut Astroturf, but, still, it is softer than molded plastic. A soft place to sit, and this, in the public sector. New Yorkers look at the radiant blue seats in astonishment. More evidence of the Giuliani miracle. Ain’t it grand?

But is a soft blue seat worth the life of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed African immigrant killed by New York City police officers two months ago? He’s under the ground in Africa, and the passengers on the Broadway 104 bus are sitting pretty.

There is a connection. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s miracle has been about making the city safe and pleasant for white affluent people and visitors, and the way he saw fit to do that was to make it less safe for poorer African-Americans. His assumption has been that the African-American community was responsible for all New York’s woes in the late 1980s. If you could get rid of them, or keep them in their place, all would be well.

Giuliani’s policies are reminiscent of the great sweeps Haiti’s Francois Duvalier used to initiate in Port-au-Prince, the capital. If a foreign delegation was coming, or a cruise ship, Papa Doc would round up all the beggars and cripples and bulldoze a slum or two, and throw half the people into his stinking jails and send the rest out to the country. For a week or two, he would make Port-au-Prince attractive and appealing, picturesque.

All Third World dictators are familiar with this kind of quick-fix urban beautification. If he had had them, Papa Doc would have gotten rid of his squeegee men, too.

It is no accident that the two men at the center of the current New York racial crisis are of African descent, but not African-Americans. Diallo and Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant brutalized by police in a Brooklyn station house restroom, were not the first black people attacked by New York’s police, but they were clearly blameless from the get go. They had never been jailed, never arrested and had no police record. They weren’t even from this country. They never owned a gun and were unarmed when the police came upon them. They couldn’t be accused of bucking the U.S. system, or rebelling against it, or rejecting it: They came here because they were attracted by what America offers. It is the sheer purity of their cases that makes them so easy to organize around.

Africans and Haitians are stunned to be at the center of the American racial maelstrom. At first, they thought the story was about what it is like to be a dark-skinned immigrant in the United States. But no. Not having lived much in white-run countries, they hadn’t internalized what it meant to be treated as inferiors or second class; they hadn’t thought much about victim status. “If the police knew Diallo was African, not African American, they never would have bothered shooting him,” a Ghanian immigrant said in the days after Diallo’s killing. “The police here are trained to expect something from African Americans. When they see black skin, that’s what they are thinking.”

Police attitudes toward black Americans have helped create a split between black-skinned immigrants of Caribbean and African origins and African Americans, because once immigrants see how African Americans are treated by the police, they try to distance themselves from African Americans and the African American experience. The protests surrounding the Diallo and Louima cases have helped to heal that split.

Never before has New York--a city famous for its backslapping politicians--seen a mayor so insensitive to its people. Yes, every mayor has managed, more or less, to ignore the needs of the city’s black community (with the arguable exception of David N. Dinkins), but Giuliani’s lack of sympathy in the wake of Diallo’s death was astounding. He’s a police booster, a reflexive lover of authority, who loves anything in uniform--even if the uniform is plainclothes, like his infamous Street Crime Unit, four of whose officers were indicted in the Diallo killing.

In the weeks after the killing, the mayor seemed to be trying to turn himself into a cookie-cutter Republican, hoping his tough-minded reaction would absolve him in Republican eyes of his support for Democrat Mario M. Cuomo in the last gubernatorial race, won by a Republican. He wants his new GOP standing to put him in a nice place from which to begin his campaign swing for Senate in New York’s conservative upstate.

“We own the streets,” was the Street Crime Unit’s motto. And they did take control of the streets of the inner city. Since the Street Crime Unit was instituted, 45,000 people have been stopped and searched by its officers, according to its own records. The unit also acknowledges that the reported figure represents only about a fifth of the actual searches; imagine what it would mean if 225,000 Jews had been stopped and searched on New York City’s streets in the past eight years. The African American neighborhoods were like occupied territory.

But Giuliani doesn’t do that kind of translation, and he naturally prefers the police to the people. He didn’t understand that things had come to a head in the Diallo case.

Now he knows. As intransigent as he is, Giuliani has been forced to cave to the intense pressures the black community brought to bear against him in the past month. The demonstrations at 1 Police Plaza, in which some 1,500 people were arrested, were the most massive protests New York has seen in 25 years, and they united mainstream African-American organizers with those not usually seen as mainstream by the white political community (viz: Al Sharpton). Eventually, almost everyone got on the bandwagon: all the old Harlem politicians, who were happily taken into police custody, as well as certain white liberals, who had been willing to acquiesce to some police excesses as long as the trade-off seemed to be a reduction in crime. It was clear that the Street Crime Unit no longer owned the streets; the demonstrators did.

It took almost a month of front-page stories to turn Giuliani around, but finally, he is making the noises of a cowed animal. He will meet with the black community. He will institute some changes in police training and behavior. Thanks.

There is a benefit lurking in all this. Because we will now see that in spite of a softening in police actions, in spite of some recognition being taken that African Americans have civil rights, too, the crime rate in New York will not shoot back up. Giuliani will be putting the Street Crime Unit back into uniform, which may sound like nothing, but for the men of the unit means a serious change in their no-holds-barred image.

But this change, even if accompanied by a conviction of the men indicted, will not cause a blip of an increase in crime in New York. And that’s not because Giuliani’s miracle is so deep. It’s because the drop in the crime rate probably had little to do with his policies in the first place and more to do with changing inner-city attitudes toward crime.

All over the country, urban crime has been falling. Tough guys like New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir, another shockingly unsympathetic figure, insist the stunning drop in crime in the past few years has to do with a strong police presence. This is the Batman theory of criminal analysis: If the superhero is performing, crime goes down. If he’s off his game, it goes up. But not all cities have instituted the kinds of draconian policing favored by Giuliani. In fact, some whose rates have dropped even faster and lower than New York’s--like San Diego--have used community-based policing, which involves the community in the work of the police department.

Sickened by what crime and crack were doing to their neighborhoods and their children, the people of many New York precincts began instituting their own grass-roots community policing. Young people weary of watching their older siblings die or be destroyed by crack organized marches on crack houses. People tried to take back their neighborhoods, and at the same time, the crack generation was either graying or dead. No one was reinstating that drug in the community. No one wanted it. The changing attitude of African American communities was at least a major factor in New York’s slowing crime rate.

No one wants to live in a police state, and the answer is: You don’t have to in order to cut crime. Giuliani wants quality-of-life improvements in New York. That’s fine. But you can’t just resort to jackboots and nightsticks and guns--and toilet plungers.

New Yorkers like their blue bus seat, but the seat would be more comfortable if they knew the men in blue were behaving according to the law of the land. If the cops are criminals, there is no example to be followed. A state of law for all the people is the only thing that will finally help continue the downward trend in violent crime.*