RIGHTS-US: Police Blue Wall Tumbling?

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 27 1999 (IPS) - The admission of guilt this week by a New York police officer charged with the brutal assault of a Haitian immigrant in 1997 showed there were limits to the police tradition of protecting officers from prosecution.

Yet some critics still believed the so-called “blue wall of silence” – the practice by police officers of refusing to testify against colleagues – generally remained strong.

The difference this time, they said, was that the assault on Abner Louima disgusted four officers into testifying against Justin Volpe, who was accused of beating Louima and forcing a stuck into his rectum on Aug. 9, 1997.

Apparently stunned by the defections of Volpe’s colleagues, the accused officer’s defense team threw in the towel and on Tuesday, Volpe told District Court Justice Eugene Nickerson in that he was guilty as charged of assaulting Louima.

“While in the bathroom in the precinct, in the presence of another officer, I sodomised Mr Louima by placing a stick in his rectum,” Volpe told Nickerson. “I then threatened to kill him if he told anybody.”

Legal experts say his admission likely will result in a minimum jail term of 22 to 27 years under federal sentencing guidelines. By pleading guilty, Volpe automatically was dismissed from the police.

The focus of the trial then switched on the role of four other alleged participants in the attack: officers Thomas Bruder, Thomas Weise and Charles Schwarz and Sergeant Michael Bellomo. All are white, as is Volpe.

As prosecutors wrapped up their arguments in the case against Volpe and four others Thursday, the confession provided a rare instance of how much impact police testimony can have once the “blue wall” was breached.

“It’s fascinating how quickly his defense collapsed when faced with the testimony of his fellow officers,” said Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, a New York-based group.

“I think the abuse that Louima suffered was so outrageous that, in order for other officers to safeguard their careers, they had to say, ‘We are not like Justin Volpe’,” McCalla argued. But that “not a sign that the blue wall of silence has caved in.”

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a longtime defender of the police, argued that the testimony against Volpe showed that police officers could be trusted to testify against their colleagues in brutality cases.

“It destroys the myth of the blue wall of silence,” Giuliani declared but critics of the city’s police department are not so sure.

Frank Serpico, a former New York police officer who testified against other officers in a landmark corruption trial in the 1970s, argued after Volpe’s plea that the incident seemed a unique case and not part of a pattern of ending police impunity.

“This was an egregious case,” agreed Michael Ratner, an attorney for New York’s Centre for Constitutional Rights. “It doesn’t stand for a breaking of the blue wall of silence.”

Still, rights activists believe that Volpe’s admission of guilt was a turning point in one of the most racially-charged cases since the 1991 beating of Rodney King – an African American – in Los Angeles.

McCalla noted that the trial, although it offered the spectacle of police officers testifying against the excesses of one colleague, also underscored something else: “It showed that police brutality is fairly routine.”

For years, human rights groups and black leaders in particular have criticised the New York Police Department (NYPD) for allowing police to harass African Americans and minority groups with impunity.

In a 1996 report, Amnesty International argued that “the large majority of victims of police abuses are racial minorities, particularly African Americans and people of Latin American or Asian descent.”

The report added, “The ‘code of silence’ in which police officers refuse to testify against their colleagues appears to have contributed to impunity in many cases.”

Even the Louima case has shown how strong the code of silence really is. One of the officers who testified against Volpe, Eric Turetzky, was immediately transferred from Volpe’s precinct in Brooklyn to the Internal Affairs unit, which investigates the actions of police officers.

“This transfer signaled to the police force that Officer Turetzky was no longer fit for any duty except investigating his colleagues,” said an editorial in the New York Times.

The Louima case was the latest in a series of incidents of police brutality in New York – most of them involving white officers and black victims – that gained nationwide publicity and massive protests.

Most recently, the city was rocked with near-daily protests in the spring following the February killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean street peddler, by four policemen. All four officers are now under criminal indictment, although their trial has yet to begin.

Despite the high-profile cases, excessive use of force by police occurs with little media attention, and with a high degree of administrative secrecy, according to rights activists.

Amnesty International, in its 1996 report, noted that under section 50-a of New York’s state civil rights law, “police personnel records are confidential and may not be disclosed except by the consent of the subject officer of a court order.”

Similarly, the Curran Commission, a body which reviewed brutality reports in the 1980s, complained in a 1987 report about the “veil of secrecy legislatively imposed on the investigative, disciplinary and prosecutorial processes of law enforcement agencies regarding claims of misuse of force.”

Yet despite repeated calls for New York to change its policy of highly confidential investigations of police abuses, few officials are willing to change the system.

Mayor Giuliani dismissed the Amnesty report, and has not even criticised the actions of the officers in the Diallo case – even though they fired 41 bullets at the Guinean, of which 19 found their mark.