NYPD Blues

During the mid-1990s, the New York City Police Department was lionized throughout the country for its innovative crime-fighting tactics and for dramatically reducing crime in the city. Politicians and police officials scrambled to claim credit. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani parlayed the crime drop into a brief bid for the U.S. Senate. His first police commissioner, William Bratton, became the media’s favorite police pundit and published an autobiography delineating his crime-fighting methods.

A key NYPD strategy incorporated hard-charging, militaristic methods that were employed primarily in minority communities. Officials created a special unit to “stop and frisk” suspects, confiscate guns and drugs and make arrests. Critics, however, contended that the vast majority of those stopped were targeted along racial lines and that only a small percentage of the detainees were found with guns or drugs. The practice has created tremendous enmity between minority residents and police, and the more humanistic community-based policing was derided by Giuliani as social work.

While many New Yorkers, astonished by the sudden and steep drop in crime, embraced the department’s methods, law enforcement experts familiar with the history of the LAPD predicted grave problems. Contrary to the claims of some police officials, there was nothing innovative about this approach, which was pioneered in the 1950s by LAPD Chief William H. Parker, who called it “proactive policing.” Though Parker was revered in the city by some, he was reviled in black and Latino neighborhoods. Daryl Gates, his successor, perpetuated the proactive approach, which many LAPD critics believe culminated in the Rodney King beating and the 1992 riots, just as Parker’s approach led inexorably to the Watts riots in 1965.

Predictions that the NYPD would soon suffer the same fate as Los Angeles police proved particularly prescient. Acclaim for the NYPD dissolved into acrimony in the wake of controversial shootings and excessive force claims, which sound eerily similar to the criticism the LAPD endured during the last few decades. Four unarmed black men have been shot on the street by New York City officers in a little more than a year, and complaints against the force have skyrocketed. The department has been repeatedly battered by the media and activist organizations after a number of egregious incidents, including the shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who was killed in the vestibule of his apartment building by four white plainclothes officers, and the torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a police precinct.

Though the LAPD has been reproved during the last few decades for treating brutal cops with leniency, the department assiduously rooted out officers who stole money, used drugs or took bribes. As a result, since World War II, the LAPD was not beset by the corruption scandals that have plagued many Eastern cities. That is why the Rampart scandal, the worst police scandal in the city’s history, has been so shocking to residents and law enforcement experts.

“Police Brutality,” Jill Nelson’s collection of a dozen incisive essays, provides both a historical and topical perspective on unjustified shootings, excessive force, police misconduct, the war on drugs and a host of other law enforcement excesses from around the country that are in the news today. Although the essays were written before Rampart, the book’s insights provide readers with a perspective on how a scandal of this magnitude could be unleashed.

All of the essays were written by black contributors who focus primarily on black communities. The strength of the book is how the contributors, who describe events through the prism of their own experiences on the streets of their own neighborhoods, portray the vast chasm of perception between minorities and whites. When a patrol car cruises down a street in a white neighborhood, most residents are reassured and feel a modicum of safety and security. But when police arrive in black neighborhoods, one essayist asserts, the casual can easily become catastrophic.

Whites cannot imagine how afraid black people are of the police, Katheryn Russell writes in a chapter entitled “The Politics of Police Brutality.” Because police brutality has not yet “crossed over,” has not yet become an issue that affects whites, it can easily be ignored. “The fact that police brutality is represented as ‘black’ has relegated it to the bottom tier of social problems,” writes Russell, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Maryland. “Whether or not an issue is ghettoized has everything to do with how it is perceived.”

In some essays, however, the focus is too narrow and the agenda too specific. Although one of the pieces was written by a retired detective, the cops are usually presented as a nebulous, malevolent force, lacking any nuance or insight that could give readers a better understanding of a culture than can engender brutality.

Los Angeles residents, inundated by a constant stream of police misconduct and malfeasance stories during the last decade--from Rodney King to O.J. Simpson to Rampart--might gain some small measure of solace from the law enforcement travails in New York, described in the book as “the epicenter of police brutality” and “the police brutality capital of America.”

Because most of the essayists are from New York, the problems of the NYPD are examined in greater detail than police scandals in other cities. But some of the essays have a broad enough scope that they offer a rare national perspective on the issue. The contributors are an eclectic group and include a historian, a former Black Panther, a poet, a psychologist and writers such as Ishmael Reed, Stanley Crouch and Derrick Bell.

Several essayists--some writing generically, some specifically--explain how and why police misconduct flourishes in America’s cities today. Many of the writers contend that a key reason for the rise in police misconduct is the poorly conceived and ill-fated war on drugs. Los Angeles, too, is represented in the book, with excellent passages on the heavy-handed history of the LAPD during the Zoot Suit riots of the 1940s, the Watts Riots of the ‘60s and the Daryl Gates era in the ‘80s.

Another Southern California incident, the 1998 Tyisha Miller shooting in Riverside, is recounted. In two essays, writers describe how a young black woman, sitting in her car at a gas station, was shot numerous times by four police officers. Neither writer, however, mentioned that Miller had a gun in her lap at the time. The officers said later that Miller, who was unconscious when they arrived, reached for the gun and they feared for their lives. They each opened fire, striking her 12 times. Neither the officers’ actions, nor their appalling tactics, can be excused, but to ignore the gun and simply describe the event as an assassination seems intellectually dishonest.

Ron Daniels argues in his essay, “The Crisis of Police Brutality and Misconduct in America,” that police brutality has sharply increased since the war on drugs was launched during the Reagan years. Surveys show that more whites than blacks use crack cocaine, but black neighborhoods remain the locus of drug enforcement efforts, according to Daniels, former executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The war on drugs,” he concludes, “is a war on us.”

The roots of the Rampart scandal can be partly traced to the attitude engendered by this so-called war, which prompts some officers to conclude that all minority teenagers are crack-slinging, gang-banging enemy aliens and all those with badges are soldiers committed to cleaning up these urban skirmish spots. As a result of this mind-set, Daniels says that when he talks to people in minority neighborhoods, “virtually every conversation I have with people about the most critical issues facing their communities includes police brutality.”

Young minority males believe they have been unjustly targeted by the NYPD’s aggressive approach. In 1998, the department’s Street Crime Unit registered 27,000 “stop-and-frisk” incidents, and about 83% of those stopped were minorities. Fewer than 5,000 of the 27,000 stop-and-frisk incidents resulted in arrests. Daniels writes that according to one survey in selected black and Latino neighborhoods, out of 100 people interviewed, 88 had been stopped and frisked.

Though the book provides an excellent glimpse into past and present incidents of police brutality, some of the solutions offered for the future sound naive or cliched or are obfuscated by academic jargon. Austin’s otherwise excellent essay is diminished somewhat by the rhetoric of his recommendations. Austin is a member of an activist organization, he writes, which advocates “that the mission of police officers is to protect property, not people, in disenfranchised communities. . . .” He adds: “The police department and its members are the military arm of a capitalist state that directs it to regulate a population . . . community pressure must exhort drug dealers to discontinue their blood trade.”

Austin may believe residents should “exhort” drug dealers and police should “protect property, not people,” but as Crouch notes in “What’s New? The Truth, As Usual,” residents in inner-city neighborhoods want, need and lobby for increased police protection. “Residents want the bad cops removed from their communities as soon as possible . . ,” Crouch writes. “Then, given the ways in which their lives are oppressed by crime and violence within their communities, they go on to say they they want more police. Right. More police.”

This dilemma is at the heart of the drop in New York City’s crime rate, now at the lowest level since the late 1960s. How do police fight crime and make the city streets safer without violating civil liberties or brutalizing the populace?

Though a book like “Police Brutality” may not provide readers with tidy solutions, it will help them winnow out the hype and the hyperbole and better understand how incidents such as the Rampart scandal, the King beating, the Louima torture and the Diallo shooting were not anomalous incidents but an inevitable culmination of decades of unresolved racial issues and social inequality that still plague our society.