Despite Pressure, NYPD Resists Call for Reforms

It was a noisy celebration of New York’s finest: In an auditorium packed with cheering police officers, eight stood proudly in line to receive promotions. As a video flashed images of hero cops on three screens, an announcer praised “the greatest police department in the world,” boasting of a city “where our life is secure and dignity is preserved.”

The Big Apple backslapping continued long after the ceremony ended at police headquarters, spilling into the plaza outside. Yet all that bravado masked a department that has come under siege in recent months and whose basic autonomy is now threatened.

As New York police recover from a wave of recent trials that have badly damaged their national image--most notably the cases of Abner Louima, who was brutalized by cops with a broomstick in a Brooklyn precinct house, and Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Bronx peddler who died in a hail of 41 police bullets--they are under intense pressure to reform the nation’s largest force.

But unlike the Los Angeles Police Department, which has been shaken to its core by the Rampart Division scandal and promises to adopt sweeping internal changes, the NYPD has generally circled the wagons, bristling at calls for new departmental reforms and insisting that it has already adopted far-reaching programs to improve community relations.

The demands for change have escalated recently as plainclothes officers fatally shot two unarmed black men in separate incidents after physical struggles with them. Police have said both shootings were accidental: In one case last week, Patrick Dorismond, an off-duty security guard, was killed when he grew angry at undercover officers who tried to buy drugs from him. No drugs or other contraband were found on him. In another incident, Malcolm Ferguson, a suspected drug dealer, was slain only four blocks from the spot where Diallo was gunned down.

Calls for a Monitor to Oversee Practices

Protests over these shootings intensified over the weekend, and a host of black leaders called for federal authorities to “take over” the police department’s patrol of minority communities. They also blasted the department’s decision to release Dorismond’s rap sheet without noting that all adult charges against him had either been dropped or reduced to disorderly conduct violations.

“To demonize this man is an outrage,” said Rep. Charles B. Rangel, who represents Harlem. “It’s like calling a rape victim a whore.”

The NYPD is the target of several investigations, including a Department of Justice inquiry that could result in a federal monitor being appointed to oversee and revamp NYPD practices. Justice Department officials are also considering whether to bring new civil rights charges against the four white officers who shot Diallo but were acquitted by a state jury in Albany.

“If we’re culpable of anything, it’s reducing crime by 55% in this city,” Police Commissioner Howard Safir said in a television interview, adding that he would not allow the force to be whipsawed by “people with a political agenda.” Standing behind him is Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who runs the department with a stricter hand than most recent mayors and who believes that the Louima and Diallo cases were tragic aberrations. He has vowed to fight in court any effort to place the 40,000-member force under federal supervision.

“The mayor and the police commissioner are in a tough spot,” says Richard Uviller, a Columbia University law professor and former prosecutor. “If they react to all of this by saying we’ve got major problems with the police, it can be very demoralizing. What they say and do publicly has to throw something to the community but also support the troops.”

Critics, however, say the NYPD has failed utterly to acknowledge the magnitude of its problems, especially the aggressive “stop and frisk” program that authorities say has been crucial in taking guns off the street but that also targets an exceedingly high number of blacks and Latinos. Under Giuliani, some experts suggest, the culture of the force has changed, putting a higher priority on tough crime reduction programs and neglecting outreach in minority communities.

“The department’s only response to these complaints has been denial, denial, denial,” says Virginia Fields, Manhattan borough president and the city’s highest-ranking black elected official. “It’s become a real tragedy for New York because so many minorities now feel estranged from this police force.”

Last week, Safir met with Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer and other community leaders to discuss policing issues for the first time since he took over in 1996. Apart from a solitary meeting with Giuliani shortly after the Diallo shooting, Fields says she has not been able to meet with him subsequently to discuss police issues.

As the lines sharpen, officials insist that the NYPD is working hard to improve its standing in the community. Yolanda Jimenez, deputy commissioner for community affairs, outlined a series of existing programs designed to calm tensions, curb youth violence, bring more minorities onto the force and build bridges to New York’s neighborhoods.

“Even in the wake of the Diallo shooting, while we know that people are very frustrated and angry, we also hear from communities of color that they recognize and support what officers are doing to reduce crime in the city,” she says.

Critics answer that the force needs to do much more. In reports issued after the attack on Louima, a host of community observers called for major changes, including a lengthening of training time in the New York Police Academy, an increased focus on nonviolent methods to defuse confrontations, a heightened effort to recruit minority officers and more political power for the city’s civilian-run complaint board, which investigates charges of police misconduct.

“The police in New York have made great efforts to protect people,” says Eli Silverman, a John Jay College criminologist. “But after something like the Diallo case happens, you just can’t be defensive. You need to say, what can we do differently?”

Adding to the sense of urgency is the fact that the city’s murder rate has ticked upward after six years of decline. In the Bronx, homicides are up 80% this year, with 52 killings as of early March, and gun arrests have dropped. Many police are leery of engaging street criminals as aggressively as in the past, citing protests over the Diallo killing, according to a report in the New York Daily News.

Amid these tensions, New York’s police debate has become heavily politicized. Giuliani’s race for the U.S. Senate highlights his crime-fighting prowess, and Democrats--including his opponent, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as President Clinton--have questioned whether the NYPD is racially insensitive. In a recent speech, the president asked whether police would have shot Diallo if he had been a white man.

Much of the anger after officers were acquitted in the case was directed at the Street Crime Unit, a 400-member outfit that included the officers involved in the Diallo shooting. Although police revamped the unit--mainly by putting the once-independent group under the control of local precincts--Giuliani resisted calls to disband the group, citing its record of confiscating guns in high-crime neighborhoods.

“The mayor likes to call these incidents a tragedy, as if they were a typhoon over which he has no control,” says Sheldon Leffler, chairman of a city council committee that oversees the police department. “But he’s not one to accept responsibility. . . . Much of this controversy is a product of changes in police culture during the time he’s been mayor.”

Since he took office in 1994, Giuliani has presided over a stunning drop in crime. But this sea change almost immediately sparked complaints that it was coming at the expense of minorities’ civil rights. Blacks and Latinos benefit from less crime, yet many activists protest that the police force is 33% minority, while 60% of New Yorkers are people of color.

The quarrel has touched off a war of statistics: New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer analyzed “stop and frisk” encounters recorded by police, finding that 75% targeted blacks and Latinos. Only 1 in 16 African Americans stopped was arrested, Spitzer found, compared with 1 in 9 white suspects.

Giuliani and Safir fired back, saying police were responding to complaints about potential suspects who happened to be black or Latino. They have noted that the New York Police Department is among the most restrained when it comes to the number of shootings.

Critics note that the city paid $70 million to settle civil lawsuits against the police in 1995-96, compared with $48 million in 1994-95; the Louima and Diallo lawsuits alone could rival those amounts. Police answer that the number of civilian complaints filed with the department for excessive force has gone down in the last two years.

“All of those police arguments got lost in the aftermath of the Diallo shooting,” says Paul Chevigny, a criminologist who has written about the NYPD. “The relations between the police and minority youths here are really quite bad, and tension is going to rise significantly if this becomes a federal issue.”

Spurred originally by the Louima case, U.S. attorneys for the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York are investigating charges of civil rights abuses in the NYPD. Although federal officials have declined to comment, they are discussing possible reforms with New York officials, according to Chevigny and others. Failing that, the Justice Department has the option of suing the NYPD to install a federal monitor over the department. Federal officials used such a threat to negotiate agreements that led to reforms in Pittsburgh and in New Jersey, among other places.

Giuliani has scoffed at the prospect, saying: “Before you can start talking about federal micro-managing of this police department, there are about 200 police departments you have to put ahead of it.”

Politics Plays Part in Resisting Reform

Major police scandals are nothing new in New York, and they seem to occur at roughly 20-year intervals, with blue-ribbon commissions routinely called in to suggest reforms, says Silverman. The Knapp Commission in the 1970s probed widespread allegations of police corruption, spurred by the dramatic testimony of officers Frank Serpico and David Durk; the Mollen Commission in 1993 investigated similar complaints and made a series of sweeping recommendations, some of which have been implemented.

The current imbroglio, however, might not lend itself so easily to such a solution, observers say. “I can’t recall a time when the political barriers to reforms were as strong as they are today, because of the Senate election,” said Norman Siegel, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “But it won’t last forever. If Giuliani wins his Senate race, he’ll leave office in nine months--and if he doesn’t, he’ll be forced [by term limits] to leave office a year later. That’s when real police reform might begin.”