UNITED STATES: New York Police Deemed Human Rights Threat

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jul 2 1996 (IPS) - New York City police have weathered numerous corruption scandals in recent years but are now facing an even larger challenge: charges that they are human rights violators.

Complaints against brutality are rising, with more than 2,000 claims filed against the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for police misconduct in 1994 alone. The rates of civilians dying in police custody and of those shot dead by police have both risen sharply.

This week, international human rights group Amnesty International announced it had collected data on more than 90 cases of ill treatment by New York police over the past 15 years. The pattern of the cases it studied, the group warns in a report, showed a history of abuse of mainly black and Latin New Yorkers by the NYPD.

“More than two-thirds of the victims in the cases examined were African American or Latino and most, though not all, of the officers were white,” the report says. “Nearly all of the victims in the cases of deaths in custody (including shootings) reviewed by Amnesty International were members of racial minorities.”

The report notes that, although more than half of New York’s population is black or Latino, only some 11 percent of the NYPD is African American and only 15 percent is Latino. The difference between minority representation in the city and in the police force is one of the largest for any U.S. city.

“We’re sick and tired of a police force that acts like a small Gestapo military force,” complains David Santiago, a community activist in Brooklyn’s predominantly Latino Williamsburg neighbourhood. “There’s a tremendous attack against minorities, even against police officers of colour.”

In recent years, as Amnesty International notes, two black police officers have been shot and wounded by their white colleagues, both times after being mistaken for criminals.

Earlier this year, a jury found officer Peter del Debbio guilty of second degree assault for shooting fellow officer Desmond Robinson, who is black. The 1992 shooting of black undercover cop Derwin Pannell briefly sparked a protest in which all black police refused undercover duty until white officers agreed to racial sensitivity training.

If the situation is dangerous for black police, it is doubly so for civilians.

Amnesty International also linked excessive use of force by officers to many more deaths in custody than the NYPD has taken into account. The report cites several cases in which suspects in custody had been subjected to choke holds or sprayed with capsicum pepper and then died of apparently related seizures or asphyxiation.

Few critics are surprised by new charges of racism and excessive brutality by the New York police. Indeed, one official from the black police officers’ Guardians Association agrees that the NYPD is guilty of human rights violations, particularly against blacks and Latinos.

“There are too many bias incidents in our city,” the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says. He attributes at least part of the reason to the lack of black officers, and thus the presence of suburban white police in black neighbourhoods they do not appreciate: “They can patrol our neighbourhoods, but we can’t patrol theirs.”

Several civilian commissions have also found the NYPD wanting. Most recently, in 1994, a commission on police corruption chaired by Judge Milton Mollen concluded, “Police brutality seems to occur, in varying degrees, wherever we uncovered corruption, particularly in crime-ridden, drug-infested precincts, often with large minority populations.”

The Mollen Commission noted repeated incidents of excessive force, and charged that police commanders tolerated such behaviour. But neither then-Mayor David Dinkins nor his successor, Rudolph Giuliani, have followed the commission’s recommendations, now re-affirmed by Amnesty International, to appoint an independent Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) to review cases of police misconduct. Giuliani supports the existing CCRB, which includes several police representatives.

Although Giuliani has pledged to fight police corruption, his critics say that the mayor — an outspoken police supporter — is less concerned with combatting police brutality. The Guardians officer notes that Giuliani led a 1992 police rally that protested efforts to implement an all-civilian CCRB, in which police brandished their guns at City Hall and referred to then-Mayor Dinkins, who is black, as “the washroom attendant”.

Giuliani’s support for a recent crackdown on “quality of life” crimes, including misdemeanors such as possession of a small amount of drugs, is contributing to a further deterioration of the rights of people suspected — but not convicted — of crimes.

Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, argues that Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir are actually adding to ill treatment of suspected criminals by arresting so many people on minor crimes that prisons and pre-arraignment cells are overcrowded.

“If cops decide they have to arrest so many people, the city has an obligation to provide adequate facilities for them,” Gangi says. Instead, he argues, the pre-arraignment facilities often hold an average of 700 to 800 people, not charged with any crime, in cramped, squalid and even dangerous conditions.

Most of those arraigned, Gangi adds, are seized on misdemeanor charges, including those for drug possession. A surge in such arrests has sparked a sharp burst in the arrested and detained populations in New York.

He cites cases of 75 people in one holding area — more than thrice the maximum capacity — and of cells with poor air circulation and jails where prisoners can be armed. In New York’s famed Rikers Island penitentiary, there were three shootings last week alone, including one where four inmates were shot by another prisoner.

“The conditions descend into the subhuman level,” Gangi says. “If cats and dogs were treated this way, the animal rights people would have a legitimate complaint.”