US-HUMAN RIGHTS: Thousands March Against Police Brutality

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 29 1997 (IPS) - The beating and torture of a Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, allegedly at the hands of ‘New York’s finest,’ has spawned a tidal wave of public outrage against the city’s police.

Thousands of New Yorkers marched across the Brooklyn Bridge Friday and demonstrated on the steps of the mayor’s office in the latest of a series of protests against brutality by the New York Police Department (NYPD). It marked the largest anti-police gathering since the protests in Los Angeles in 1991 after motorist Rodney King was beaten with clubs by police officers in an incident captured on TV.

The Friday ‘Day of Outrage’, banded together members of the 600,000 strong community of Haitian-Americans living in New York and dozens of victims of police brutality, politicians and activists – all critical of what they deemed to be the NYPD’s impunity in using excessive force.

“Abner Louima is in the hospital because there is a long line of other victims who were beaten and killed, and no-one did anything,” Richie Perez of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights told demonstrators Friday. “When we let our blood be taken cheaply, it will be taken again and again.”

Louima, however, would be “the straw to break the camel’s back” when it comes to police brutality, said City Councilwoman Una Clarke.

Ever since Louima was admitted to Coney Island Hospital with internal injuries consistent with penetration by an blunt object, the Haitian immigrant’s claim that he was tortured by police with a bathroom plunger has become a test case of police brutality.

After being arrested early in the morning of Aug. 9 outside a Haitian club in Brooklyn, Louima said he was beaten and taken to Brooklyn’s 70th police precinct, where, he claimed, officers shoved a plunger up his rectum and down his mouth while shouting racial slurs at him.

Four officers – Justin Volpe, Thomas Bruder, Thomas Wiese and Charles Schwarz – have been indicted for the attack, while several other officers present at the 70th precinct have turned in their badges and are being questioned. Layers for Louima, whose internal injuries have worsened, have said he will sue New York City for 55 million dollars in damages.

Despite Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s pledge to investigate the matter fully, the alleged torture has focused attention on what critics claim has been insufficient oversight of the police force. Many speakers at the demonstration outside City Hall explicitly took to task Giuliani – a Republican running for re-election in November – for downplaying previous cases of brutality.

“Mayor Giuliani, if you take credit for the drop in crime…then you must also take credit, responsibility and guilt for the brutality of the police department which you have refused to rein in,” argued Ted Shaw, associate counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People Legal Defence Fund.

Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a member of a task force appointed by Giuliani last week to monitor police brutality, lambasted the mayor for exemplifying “the New York denial syndrome when it comes to police brutality.”

“Myth Number One (is that) it is an isolated incident, it is an aberration,” Siegel argued. “How many isolated incidents do we need before it is not ‘isolated’ … and is a pattern of police brutality?”

Human rights groups have in the past warned that the city government was ineffective in monitoring and punishing police abuse. Siegel estimates that some 2,000 of the 30,000 officers in the NYPD could be abusive, but rights groups like Amnesty International say that other officers are reluctant to speak out against the “bad apples”.

In the four days after Louima’s alleged torture and before media received an anonymous tip about the incident, not one officer reported what had happened.

A Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), created by former Mayor David Dinkins in 1993 to penalise police brutality, has examined some 20,000 cases of abusive behaviour over the past four years, but has dismissed only one officer over that time. Only 180 officers have been disciplined by the CCRB since 1993, with many escaping with only a lecture or the loss of one vacation day. For many groups, that ratio is not good enough. Haitians have complained for years that their complaints about mistreatment by police were ignored.

“They think they can get away with it because of the language barrier,” said Henry Frank, executive director of the Haitian Centres Council, noting that most recent Haitian immigrants primarily speak French or Creole.

The Friday ‘Day of Outrage’ and the annual Labour Day parade by Brooklyn’s Caribbean communities that is scheduled for Monday are both intended to spur voter registration, in a clear effort to put political pressure on normally police-friendly public figures like Giuliani. But voter registration among Haitians is low, with many immigrants like Louima – who arrived here in 1990 – preferring to keep their native citizenship rather than to vote in New York.

Still, Giuliani is expected to feel the heat from the protests. His main Democratic challenger, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, attended the Friday rally, arguing, “Wherever we come from, we are all of us Abner Louima’s family.”

Already, Giuliani has had to backtrack from his prevous defence of the NYPD by calling for a series of town meetings in every police precinct to grapple with brutality issues and by forming a task force, including long-time critics like Siegel. That is itself a dramatic change since last year, when the mayor dismissed an Amnesty International report analysing 90 cases of police ill- treatment as “anecdotal.”