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Why Giuliani`s Cops Did Nothing In Central Park
By Robert Lederman
It would be easy to follow the lead of Mayor Giuliani and blame the numerous
individual police officers who apparently did nothing to prevent, investigate
or even report to their superiors the mob violence, sexual assaults and robberies
that took place in Central Park this past Sunday. Stereotypes of cops as lazy,
donut-eating louts readily come to mind.
Is there another explanation?
Victims of the mob violence and numerous witnesses have reported that a large
number of police officers stationed within yards of the hour long incident sat
on benches during the attacks, refused to take reports from witnesses, radioed
no one for help and even dissuaded some female victims from filing a police
report. The Mayor says that pending an internal police department investigation
confirming the victim and bystander accusations, the cops will be fired.
Either NYPD officers are even worse people than activists have made them out
to be or there is another side to this story, a side Mayor Giuliani desperately
wants to obscure.
This incident perfectly illustrates the selective crime reporting and creative
NYPD book-keeping behind Mayor Giulianis very impressive-but unfortunately very
phony-crime statistics. These statistically-oriented record keeping techniques,
which in this case involved ignoring numerous sexual assaults, are the source
of his undeserved reputation. To paraphrase a famous Zen saying, if a crime
happens in NYC but the police don't record it, did it really happen?
According to an article in the NY Post, police officers in the same general
area and time as the attacks confiscated 2,500 bottles of beer, 100 bottles
of liquor and 16 bags of marijuana and made 13 arrests. They also issued 700
summonses. Clearly the cops were very hard at work faithfully following the
prioritized orders of the Mayor.
Those orders include downplaying anything, including sexual assaults in Central
Park, that might make his administration look bad. Anyone who has attempted
as I have to report an assault, robbery or other crime to the NYPD during the
seven years of the Giuliani administration knows how this game works.
The police do their best to dissuade you from making a report in the first
place. If you are very persistent they will do their best to downgrade the seriousness
of the crime. An assault gets written up as an dispute or harassment. A store
break-in becomes a report of vandalism. Robberies gets recorded as lost property.
As a result, crime statistics keep going down while crime may actually be going
up.
The flip-side of this creative police book-keeping is that hundreds of thousands
of unnecessary or false misdemeanor arrests each year which are never prosecuted
or are dismissed by the City after a few court appearances are used as the statistical
“proof” of the Mayor's crime fighting prowess. The police are ordered by Giuliani
to use massive amounts of personnel and resources to arrest panhandlers, homeless
people, squeegee guys, street artists, truants, farebeaters, vendors, hookers,
marijuana smokers and protesters.
These arrests cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year,
remove thousands of officers from the streets to process the paperwork and do
nothing whatsoever to make the City safer. If anything, the resentment these
arrests and harassment cause in their predominantly Black and Latino targets
has made the City a hotbed of racial animosity. They have also made being an
NYPD officer an increasingly distasteful career choice.
The carefully-maintained illusion that the City and especially Central Park
and the surrounding midtown area have been transformed into a safe haven for
tourists and the elite is the dogma at the center of the Giuliani myth. The
30 million tourists who visited the City last year, filled its hotels and boosted
its economy will tell you (quoting Giuliani) that he personally eliminated crime
and made New York the, “safest big city in America”.
The city-wide mayhem of this past weekend, in which the NYPD publicly admits
to at least 40 separate attacks in which 59 people were shot or stabbed and
six victims died (these figures do not include the Central Park sexual assaults
and robberies), shows that you cannot believe everything you read in a travel
brochure. The reality is that murder, rape, bias crimes, sexual assaults and
some categories of robbery are increasing in NYC despite a decade-long nationwide
crime drop.
Blaming individual police officers for their seeming indifference in Central
Park this Sunday is no more justified than blaming them for the racial profiling
policy that has recently led to unarmed and innocent men being shot to death
in NYC. If there is anything the NYPD does well it is following orders. As the
cops always say, we are just doing our job.
Their job is dictated each and every day by Mayor Giuliani who personally sets
the priorities for the NYPD including deciding which individuals will be arrested,
which behaviors will result in arrest and arrest quotas generally. At times
of intense media scrutiny-as I've personally experienced on more than one occasion-the
NYPD even has non-arrest policies. This Sunday appears to have been one of those
days.
If tomorrow morning the Mayor ordered the police to accurately document each
and every crime they became aware of, NYC would instantly revert to being America's
statistical crime capital. Giuliani bragged on a recent installment of his Friday
radio talk show that he was in charge of compiling crime statistics for the
Reagan Justice Department. Apparently he learned his lessons very well.
The police are used by Giuliani primarily as a tool of propaganda on the one
hand and intimidation on the other. Maintaining the image and statistical results
of crime fighting rather than focusing on actual crime fighting is the goal.
Where I live in Brooklyn cops are assigned to patrol the streets in excessive
numbers during the day when elderly residents and storeowners will be sure to
see them. They are on every corner, busily writing up their daily quota of parking
tickets and searching for vendors to arrest. Their patrol cars obstruct the
streets as they pull over car after car for the slightest infraction causing
even more traffic congestion than there already is.
All of this extremely visible police activity gives the illusion that the neighborhood
is being heavily protected. The only problem is that these police officers are
barely needed during the day when the streets are filled with people. At night
when things become a lot more dangerous, disorderly and disruptive, there's
not a cop to be seen.
There's never a shortage of police day or night when it comes to harassing
and intimidating protesters, however. Commenting on the Central Park attacks
both Giuliani and Commissioner Safir claimed that no amount of police could
guarantee a crime-free park. This is the same Mayor who routinely sends an army
of officers to clamp down on even the smallest protest that criticizes his policies.
On the streets of New York under Giuliani you have a better chance of getting
away with a sexual assault than with displaying a painting critical of the Mayor.
During a 65 day-long street artist protest in front of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in 1998 Giuliani had hundreds of officers on full-time duty surrounding
a handful of artists peacefully creating and displaying anti-Giuliani signs
and portraits. Each day for sixty-five days artists were dragged away in handcuffs.
Out of more than 100 arrests and criminal summonses issued during the protest
not one resulted in a defendant plea bargaining, paying a fine or being convicted
of a crime.
My own 41 arrests, not one of which has resulted in a conviction, involved
hundreds of police officers, lawyers for the NYPD, high-ranking supervisors
including Deputy Mayors, survelliance and post-arrest interrogations by detectives
from the Intelligence Division and seven years of court appearances wasting
the time and salaries of judges, District Attorneys and Legal Aid defense lawyers.
Virtually every officer involved in my arrests spent his or her entire shift
processing my arrest paperwork while freely acknowledging that the arrest was
probably unjustified and would be dismissed.
If police organizations like the Patrolman's Benevolent Association want to
salvage what's left of their shredded reputation they need to go public with
the truth about the Mayor's manipulation of these statistics and his chronic
self-serving misuse of the NYPD. Instead of attacking Bruce Springsteen for
using his freedom of speech to write a vaguely critical song about Amadou Diallo
they need to exercise their own freedom of speech and expose the Mayor, who
continues to be the City's number one criminal.
Giuliani is showing no hesitation to place the blame for the Central Park scandal
on the police. Will they quietly be the fall guys or will they show some real
courage and expose the Mayor for the pathetic liar that he is? We the people,
the ones the NYPD are actually supposed to be working for, are waiting to hear
from New York's Finest.
[Note: due to a formatting problem with AOL I have left out the apostrophies
in some words.]
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
ARTISTpres@aol.com (718) 743-3722
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
Also see:
http://www.levymultimedia.com [For
essays and notes on pesticides scroll down to and click on Lederman archive
link or go to
http://www.levymultimedia.com/lederman/index.html
http://www.american-politics.com/101299Lederman.html
http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/district-court.html
http://www.mindspring.com/%7Etheremin/fooliani/index.html
June 15, 2000
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