NEW YORK - The night was the idea of my wife's second cousin, a veteran New York City cop who was concerned that anything I might write about the death of Amadou Diallo should reflect "the real truth about the Finest," as the Big Apple's cops like to call themselves.
So we met at Mullen's, a dark and ancient bar on Seventh Avenue no more than a brisk 20-minute walk from the precinct where he works. "Some of the guys will be there," he promised.
It was Thursday night, six tumultuous days after four white cops were acquitted of cutting down the black and unarmed Diallo in a hail of 41 shots, when my tutors called the class to order with the clink of long-necked Budweisers. The only condition was that no names be used - a sensible precaution given that the Big Apple's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has banned his rank-and-file cops from talking to any reporters.
"You see, it's not Hollywood out there," said my wife's cousin, an Italian guy who hails from Brooklyn and has almost 20 years on the force behind him. For the purposes of what follows, let's call him Vito.
"You see NYPD Blues or something and you civilians think you know what it's like. But it's not," he said.
"Good show, though," added Vito's pal, Sonny, who picked up the thread. "What they put in the show, they get right. But they leave out an awful lot, too."
"Well, they have to leave it out," continued Vito. "You think the sponsors are going to let them put what happened to Artie.
Artie, it turned out, was a rookie cop and health fanatic attached to a precinct on the West Side. One day, not long after graduating from the Police Academy, he was out on patrol with an older partner when the dispatcher sent them to a tenement near the Hudson River. The landlord had taken exception to a bad smell coming from an upper apartment, used a master key to get inside and discovered his tenant dead and bloated in the bath with a plastic bag pulled over his head.
"So the older cop hands Sonny a cigar and says 'This is for you,' Vito said, his face crinkling with glee at a story that he clearly enjoyed telling. "Well, Sonny won't touch the stogey. He doesn't smoke, works out every day, his body's a temple - you know the sort.
"'Suit yourself,' the older guy tells him. And off they go."
At the apartment building, the cops marched up flight after flight of stairs, the smell growing worse the higher they went. Bad enough on the landing, the stench of death was overpowering when the landlord let them inside.
"So the older guy asks the kid one more time if he's sure he doesn't want a smoke, and the kid says 'no' and 'Quit buggin' me about the cigars already'," said Vito. "When they go into the apartment, the tub is in the kitchen like a lot of these old joints, and the stink is just beyond belief. So the kid takes one look at what's floating in the water and tosses his lunch all over the cadaver.
"Meanwhile, the old guy is puffing away and laughing. 'See, kid,' he says, 'There's nothing like a cheap cigar to kill the smell of an old corpse.' They don't teach that stuff at the academy."
It was Sonny who delivered the twist in the tale. "And the really funny thing was that Artie gets reamed out by his sergeant for throwing up and ruining a crime scene before the medical examiner could get there.
After that, the kid developed a taste for cheap cigars, too."
They laughed again and another round arrived. New York's cops haven't had all that much to raise their spirits lately so an old story, even a gruesome one, makes a welcome change.
But a lot of people aren't laughing in this city, and not only because of the Diallo acquittals. At some point over the next few days, a Brooklyn jury will rule on the fate of three other cops charged with looking the other way while one of their colleagues sodomised a Haitian migrant with a broken broom handle. Once again, the cops are white and the victim, who almost died from a perforated bowel, was a young black man.
Nor is that the end of the outrages now prompting almost daily demonstrations around New York.
Last Sunday, a retired NYPD detective summoned the local Bronx cops to his home to report a burglary. Unfortunately, the first officers on the scene were cowboys who mistook the home owner for a thief and pistol-whipped him in front of his screaming family.
Predictably, the retired detective was a dark-skinned Latino and his attackers white.
On Tuesday, two more Bronx cops were busted for battering a woman who cursed them out when they refused to arrest her violent boyfriend. According to investigators from the NYPD's Internal Affairs unit, the accused duo drove her in handcuffs to a vacant lot, hammered her with their nightsticks and then left her bleeding and unconscious in a freezing drizzle. She, too, was black and her assailants white Finally, as the beers flowed at Mullen's bar, the TV on the way to the men's room interrupted the evening with the report of yet another police shooting. Once again it was in the Bronx, just two blocks from the doorstep where Diallo's life was snuffed out, and the riot cops were out in force to keep the dead man's angry neighbours in line. According to the TV reporter, the suspect was a petty drug dealer who had been shot in the head as he fled from the four undercover officers trying to arrest him.
"Sheesh," sighed Sonny, "It's some week in this town!"
Why New York's Finest should find themselves on the bad side of public opinion after so many years of stunning successes is a moot point. Aggressive policing has pushed down the murder rate to levels last seen in the innocent days of the early Sixties. Burglaries, muggings and rapes have witnessed similar dramatic decreases. Even car thefts have shrunk, so much so that the piles of broken glass which used to mark where vehicles had vanished into the night, are no longer a ubiquitous motif of urban mayhem.
It was Mayor Giuliani's reputation as a crimebuster that made him enter the Senate race, though he did not expect to be running against Hillary Clinton. Now, as the streets ring to protesters' chants and the US Justice Department talks about appointing a monitor to keep an eye on New York's cops, the mayor's political future may well be in jeopardy.
Vito and his mate Sonny attribute the spate of hair-trigger brutality to "just bad luck." Others see it in a different light.
Almost two years ago, former NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who led Giuliani's initial assault on crime, predicted that things could turn nasty very quickly.
"When we began the effort to restore order to the streets and suppress crime levels, the situation was so bad I really only had to order my officers to do what they were paid to do, which is get out on the streets and keep the peace," said Bratton. "The police had not been doing that and criminal behaviour always flourishes in a law-enforcement vacuum.
"Aggressive policing was needed then. Now that crime levels are down, what the city needs is maintenance policing. Pushing too hard is counterproductive."
Bratton made those comments long before this city heard the names of Diallo and Abnner Louima, the black man sodomised by a cop who mistakenly believed he had punched him during a melee outside a Brooklyn nightclub.
Unfortunately, by that stage, Bratton was no longer around to order his troops to pull back. Perhaps concerned that his police chief was stealing his limelight, Giuliani squeezed Bratton out of the job and installed the city's then-Fire Commissioner, Howard Safir, in his place.
The difference was telling. Where Bratton had always been his own man, yielding to nobody, not even the mayor, Safir has been a political creature from the start. Since the mayor wanted even lower crime stats and lots more busts, Safir set out to oblige him by boosting the size of the elite Street Crimes Unit by almost 300 per cent in less than 12 months. It was four of those new and inexperienced SCU recruits, two of them attached to the squad for less than a week, who shot Diallo in a tragic moment of panic when they mistook the street vendor's wallet for a pistol.
When Bratton unleashed the CSU with explicit orders to disarm criminals, his men were averaging one arrest for every three suspects they stopped and frisked. Under his successor Safir, the beefed up CSU made 18,023 stop-and-frisks in 1997 for only 4899 arrests. The next year, when random frisks rose to 27,061, arrests shrank to a scant 4647. To the innocent black men who were tossed against a wall and patted down for no other reason than that they had aroused the suspicions of the overwhelmingly white CSU men, their crime was being black in a public place. As the black activist the Rev Calvin Butts said after the Diallo acquittals: "In Harlem, we don't see the police as our protectors. We see them as an army of occupation."
Back at Mullen's, neither Vito nor Sonny had much time for Butts and his ilk. Like the viewers who mistake TV cop shoes for the real thing, they dismissed the minister as an innocent who has never seen the world through the blue prism of a squad car's windshield.
"Tell me Butts isn't safer up there in Harlem for all the work our guys have done," sniffed Vito. "But a cop has an accident, a tragedy like Diallo, and nobody talks about the good stuff. We're all just killers."
Hair-trigger brutality just bad luck, say NY police
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