As a native New Yorker who lived under Giuliani's white-knuckled leadership from 1994-2001, I am surprised at the current stories coming out of his campaign. Yes, he is running as the Mayor of 9/11. But so many west of the Hudson believe he is the man that tamed the big bad beast of New York City, the new sheriff in town, swaggering in to clean it up. My memory of events is different. I remember him as a race-baiting, divisive, intimatidating figure with a volatile temper and a nasty piece of work overall.
To use race to vault up a political career is not new for Republicans. Remember Reagan and his welfare queen driving a Cadillac? Or the first President Bush with his Willie Horton ads carefully crafted by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes?
Rudolph Giuliani created such a climate of racial divisiveness, suspicion and intimidation that it was almost inevitable that appalling cases of police profiling and brutality would occur. During his mayoralty, two cases did: that of Abner Louima's torture in a police precinct house and Amadou Diallo's massacre.
Giuliani set the tone right off the bat by refusing to meet with other New York elected officials who were black, including the State Comptroller Carl McCall and Virginia Fields, the Manhattan Borough President. He dismissed them as being more interested in publicity than in accomplishing policy goals. In a New York Times article of May 25, 1999 by Dan Barry, "Mayor, Under Fire, Opens Door Wider to Black Officials", Giuliani justified snubbing black officials because he claimed they were "highly partisan" Democrats who resented his Republican administration. However, after the Diallo shooting in 1999 he did yield somewhat, deigning to meet with McCall after 5 years.
The first case: Abner Louima was a Haitian who was unlucky enough to be in front of a Haitian dance club in Brooklyn when police came to break up a fight between two women. He was arrested by police on charges of assault, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and obstructing justice, as reported on CNN.com, although later all the charges were dropped. According to the article:
Police yelled racial epithets, put Louima in a patrol car and beat him several ties before taking him to the 70th Precinct station house.
It was there that Louima says the officers pulled down his pants and led him to the bathroom, where they allegedly sodomized him with a plunger, and then jammed the handle in his mouth.
Louima's attorney, Brian Figeroux, says the alleged abuse should not have occurred considering the number of officers at the station house at the time.
"There were four police officers beating, and there were two officers in the bathroom, and many police officers at the precinct seeing what was going on. Someone should have known and stopped this from happening."
Al Sharpton summed it up succinctly at the time:
"The climate in this city has added to police feeling they could get away from such perverted acts. They need to be arrested. There is no reason, none, that you can justify torturing a human being in a civilized society."
Giuliani spoke of the Louima case as one in which a number of rogue cops were brought to justice by the testimony of other cops and the Internal Affairs Bureau of the police. Actually, the police investigation was forced into action by an emergency room nurse who was horrified by Louima's injuries.
On March 6, 2000, a federal court jury in Brooklyn convicted three cops of conspiring to cover up Louima's station house torture. The fourth cop involved, Justin Volpe, had been already convicted of sodomizing Louima and tearing a one-inch hole in his rectum and bladder.
Appalling Case #2: The February 4, 1999 massacre of Amadou Diallo, a 23 year old man from Guinea, Africa, who was standing near his building when four plain clothes policemen passed him in an unmarked police car. They got out of the car and approached him. The officers claimed they identified themselves as police officers and that Diallo ran towards his apartment, ignoring their orders to stop and show his hands.
As Diallo reached into his pocket, one of the cops shouted, "Gun!" to his colleagues. The officers opened fire on Diallo. One cop fell down, appearing to be shot. The four officers fired 41 shots, hitting Amadou Diallo 19 times.
The investigation found no weapons on Diallo's body, only a wallet near his lifeless body. A Bronx grand jury indicted the officers on charges of 2nd degree murder and reckless endangerment on March 25, 1999. On December 16, 1999 due to a defense request, a New York appellate court ordered a change of venue from the Bronx to Albany, New York, citing detrimental pre-trial publicity. The case moved from a mostly minority community to a mostly white, distant community.
After 3 days of deliberations, on February 25, 2000, the jury unanimously voted to acquit the officers of all charges.
The basic defense strategy was to blame the victim. The officers asserted that their response was justified because they believed that Diallo was drawing a gun. In a New York Times Article dated February 26, 2000, the day after the verdict, the accused's lawyers said that Diallo was to blame for his own plight because he behaved suspiciously and had not obeyed the officers' commands to stop.
The chief prosecutor, Eric Warner of the Bronx district attorney's office, had argued that the officers...had caused the fatal confrontation by prejudging Mr. Diallo as a possible rapist or robber, and never considering that Mr. Diallo might have had a right to be on the stoop.
Upon cross-examination, Officer Carroll acknowledged that he never considered that Mr. Diallo might have had a legitimate reason for being where he was, or that he might have lived in the building. And Officer Carroll and the other officers acknowledged that they never considered the situation from Mr. Diallo's point of view.
Mr. Diallo might have been frightened, Mr. Warner said, by the sight of a car driving slowly down his deserted street in the middle of the night, and by "four big men getting out of a car with guns."
The officers insisted that Diallo was to blame for catching the bullets. He did not respond to their commands to stop; instead, he ran into the vestibule of his building and began digging in his pocket, then turned toward the officers with something in his right hand. It turned out to be his wallet.
The officers said they thought it was a gun and began shooting, setting off a chaotic hail of richocheting bullets and muzzle flashes that made it seem as if they were in a firefight.
More than 300 people gathered to protest the verdict in the Bronx. They were met by a heavy police presence. At least 14 people were killed.
One of the Bronx protesters, Francisco Peguero, 22, an electrical technician who works near the building, said he could not understand how a jury had been unable to find the officers guilty of any charge. "I'm very upset, very upset about the outcome of that," he said. "You can defend yourself if it's one shot, two shots. But to unload four weapons on him, that's not right."
Giuliani fostered a climate of fear and intimidation in the city. He can't gloss over that. I remember.