Giuliani is a racist,
according to Feds!

by Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
October 8, 2000

Confirming what eight million New Yorkers already knew, Federal prosecutors have announced that the NYPD engages in racial profiling. Should New Yorkers be relieved that we are finally going to be rescued from Racist Rudy?

The reality is that Federal authorities are fully aware of a host of illegal and unconstitutional practices by the Mayor and his criminal administration. Racial profiling is just one small category of these crimes against the people of New York City.

Was this really news for the Clinton administration or a discovery based on pouring over police records? They have sat quietly by while the Mayor trashes the First Amendment, terrorizes the Black and Latino community and sprays poison gas repeatedly on the entire City. His welfare, food stamp, street artist, homeless and City Hall access policies continue to flagrantly violate the law despite the Mayor repeatedly losing in Federal Court on each.

Without a series of lawsuits filed by individual citizens and social justice groups since Giuliani first infested City Hall in 1994-which have partially stymied the implementation of his agenda-this administration would now have a fully-operational police state in place with full Federal approval and cooperation. Street protests have actually done far more than these lawsuits to slow the advance of Giuliani's repression. Note that the same U.S. officials who are now lauding the people of Yugoslavia for violently rioting against their dictator treat Americans who peacefully carry a sign outside the Republican and Democratic conventions as if they were terrorists.

If not for the Mayor's characteristically exaggerated response-viciously denouncing the report and any possibility that the NYPD practiced racial profiling as lies-the facts could be conveniently buried under seemingly well-intentioned calls for reforming the police. Instead, Giuliani has made it clear to anyone with a brain that he takes this report as a personal attack on him, his "ideas"and his legacy-as well he should.

His inflammatory rhetoric-that if the police were looking for a suspected Black rapist fitting a particular description and stopped 100 men that they could be expected to arrest at least 40 of them on unrelated charges-is a textbook explanation of the idea behind racial profiling. One need only slightly reword the Mayor's statement-if the police broke down the door of 100 White men's homes looking for a suspect they could arrest 40 of them on unrelated charges-to see that a police state with no Fourth Amendment rights is exactly what Giuliani has in mind. That this "problem"is occurring in many parts of the U.S. is proof that it is a nationwide Federal policy not an aberration involving individual racist police officers.

The entire reason we have a Fourth Amendment is that repressive dictatorships always resort to this exact same arbitrary stop and search policy. It is the single most effective technique for controlling people. To make it acceptable to the majority it must first be applied to a feared, hated or despised minority such as immigrants, Blacks or in Nazi Germany, Jews. Once the majority allows this policy to continue it can be expanded to include everyone.

In terms of crime fighting it is a very effective technique. Without the Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful searches and seizures drug possession, having a gun in one's home for protection or ignoring a parking ticket would be foolhardy acts. In terms of political suppression which is the real goal of these policies-even keeping texts on one's computer that criticized someone like Giuliani would be dangerous.

Activists who imagine that the Feds will end the unequal treatment of minorities by the NYPD are fooling themselves. That Federal prosecutors keep trying to negotiate a settlement with Giuliani about this issue shows how little intention they have to really open up this can of worms. Giuliani is the prototype for all U.S. law enforcement, Republican or Democrat. What Giuliani does to Blacks and Latinos in NYC today is what the Federal government intends to do to all Americans tomorrow.

If all that comes out of this is recommendations for more "sensitivity training" for police officers or "guidelines" prohibiting racial profiling, nothing will have changed. What we need is the immediate removal of Giuliani from office and the public renunciation of his agenda. Nothing less will even begin to rectify the sorry state of civil liberties in the Capital of the World.

We need the full and complete reinstatement of the Fourth Amendment rights that the past few administrations-and most particularly the Clinton Administration-have eroded. And paradoxically, we need to make certain that GW Bush is not elected President. In the first debate Bush stated that he'd appoint an Attorney General, "who would enforce the law". Rudy Giuliani is exactly who he was referring to.

It's also long overdue for the mainstream media to stop leaving out the most important part of this story. Giuliani gets his so-called ideas from a CIA-sponsored right wing think tank, The Manhattan Institute. Every misbegotten policy he's tried to implement comes directly from this organization which is funded by the far right and by corporations with direct ties to Eugenics, racism and in some cases, Nazi Germany. For the intellectual premises behind his policies look no further than the Bell Curve and Fixing Broken Windows, both of which are closely identified with the Manhattan Institute. GW Bush has publicly claimed that next to the bible the Manhattan Institute has had the greatest influence on his own ideas.

Racial profiling is an inevitable result of the ideas behind the Giuliani administration rather than an aberration caused by either his personality or the presence of some racially-biased police officers in the NYPD. You can't very well have a Eugenics-based administration without scapegoats.

A possible result of this investigation is that the Giuliani administration will attempt to "prove"they are not racially biased by ordering the police to begin a stop and frisk campaign in communities in which Black and Latino citizens are not the majority. All they have to do is search a few hundred thousand white teen truants to create a statistical counterbalance.

The most hopeful aspect of this issue is the shortfall of new recruits for the NYPD and the unprecedented number of early retirees from it. This is a testament to the good sense and decency of the average person who wants nothing to do with enforcing the Mayor's increasingly repressive police state.

The tight circle of grim-faced thugs that stand behind Furhrer Giuliani at his press conference each day are becoming an increasingly isolated bunch. We can only hope he'll save them a spot in the bunker and a sip from his cup of Malathion as the end draws near.

Federal Inquiry Finds
Racial Profiling in Street Searches

By BENJAMIN WEISER
October 5, 2000

A federal investigation of the New York Police Department's Street Crime Unit has determined that its officers engaged in racial profiling in recent years as they conducted their aggressive campaign of street searches across the city, officials said.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who began their investigation in the weeks after the 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo, are now in talks with the Giuliani administration to discuss their findings and perhaps to negotiate a set of changes that would avert a lawsuit, the officials said.

If the talks fail, prosecutors could seek authorization from the Justice Department to go to court under civil rights law and ask a judge to order broad changes in the operations of the Street Crime Unit and possible oversight by a federal monitor.

Prosecutors have based their findings on a statistical analysis of the Street Crime Unit's searches of people its officers had stopped because they were suspected of committing crimes or carrying guns, one official said. Prosecutors told the city that their analysis concluded that blacks and Hispanics in the city were disproportionately singled out in the searches, and that the imbalance could not be explained by the fact that the city's minority neighborhoods typically had higher crime rates, the official said.

Mary Jo White, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office has conducted the inquiry, would not comment other than to say that her office's investigation was continuing. Officials with the city corporation counsel's office also would not comment.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and police and city officials have in the past adamantly rejected allegations that any officers engaged in racial profiling. They did so, for example, when the New York State attorney general, Eliot L. Spitzer, issued a report late last year saying that the department's street search tactics unfairly singled out the city's black and Hispanic residents.

The Street Crime Unit - squads of elite undercover officers that were sent into high-crime sections of the city - was seen by the department as one of its great successes, the unit's ability to get guns off the street having played a large role in the broader reductions in violent crime.

But the performance and conduct of the unit came under intense scrutiny after Mr. Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, was shot to death on a Bronx street by four members of the unit. Although the four officers were ultimately acquitted of any crime, the Police Department did significantly reorganize the Street Crime Unit, and ordered many of its officers into uniform.

Justice Department officials in Washington have yet to announce whether they will seek criminal civil rights charges against the four officers who shot Mr. Diallo.

The federal investigation into the Street Crime Unit is not the only inquiry into problems within the department. Since 1997, after Abner Louima was tortured in a Brooklyn station house, federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York have been investigating patterns of brutality within the department and deficiencies in disciplining problem officers. Negotiations between the prosecutors and the city aimed at avoiding a formal lawsuit have dragged on for months.

The full scope of Ms. White's investigation and its findings could not be learned. When prosecutors first announced the inquiry, in March 1999, they said the investigation would focus on whether officers with the Street Crime Unit systematically deprived people of their rights through their "stop and frisk"tactics and other practices.

But it is for the moment unclear what reforms Ms. White is seeking and whether they would address only the Street Crime Unit or more generally deal with the training and policies of officers throughout the department who conduct stop-and-frisk operations.

The Justice Department has addressed concerns of racial profiling in other cities. In one recent example, Los Angeles city officials negotiated a series of reforms with the Justice Department to address allegations of systemic abuse by the police. That tentative settlement includes a requirement that the Los Angeles Police Department, in an effort to assess the extent of racial profiling, collect data on the race of people who are stopped by officers.

In another case, the New Jersey State Police entered into a consent decree with the Justice Department barring police officers from using race as a basis for making traffic stops. That settlement also requires troopers to document the race, sex and ethnicity of all drivers who are stopped, and provides oversight with a computer tracking system and a federal monitor.

Ms. White's findings came after her office obtained thousands of forms documenting stop-and-frisk searches conducted by New York City police officers over the last several years. The forms, known as UF- 250's, are supposed to be filled out by officers when they stop and frisk someone on the street, and are often used as an investigative tool.

The city spent about $1.5 million over many months to enter about 320,000 UF-250 reports into a computerized database, and then turned over the database to prosecutors for analysis. Searches conducted by the Street Crime Unit accounted for roughly 10 percent of the total reports.

Although it is not known what the city's response has been to the findings of prosecutors, Mayor Giuliani and other city officials have repeatedly dismissed previous allegations of racial profiling against the department.

When Mr. Spitzer, the state attorney general, asserted last year that his study of stop-and-frisk incidents had indicated a bias against the city's minority citizens, the mayor and police officials attacked the findings and the methodology behind them as flawed. They said Mr. Spitzer's report failed to adequately take into account the fact that a disproportionate number of the city's violent crimes took place in minority neighborhoods.

And when a group of blacks and Hispanics filed a class-action lawsuit last year, asking a federal judge in Manhattan to halt the operations of the Street Crime Unit because, the suit said, the unit was illegally stopping and frisking people because of their race, the city's corporation counsel, Michael D. Hess, said: "The plaintiffs are asking the court to stop a practice that does not exist. Therefore, there is nothing to stop."

Mayor Giuliani has also asserted that the Clinton Justice Department has been responding to political pressure in its investigations, most recently after the Rev. Al Sharpton met with Attorney General Janet Reno in August, urging her to to seek federal oversight of the Police Department.

It is possible, too, that city officials could argue that steps have already been taken to improve the fairness of street searches. The Police Department last summer began a pilot program in different commands across the city that required officers to fill out much more detailed reports on their searches, a step that department officials said would make it easier for officers to explain and justify their actions.

Moreover, the Street Crime Unit today is structured very differently from the way it was when Mr. Diallo was killed. Instead of an autonomous unit that operated across the city under its own chain of command, the Street Crime Unit has been divided into eight separate teams that report to the police chiefs responsible for the eight patrol sectors in which the city is divided.

Police officials who announced the change last year described it as a redeployment. Officers, however, flew a white flag of surrender that day outside their headquarters in the Bronx.

Officers still stop and frisk people they suspect of carrying guns, and focus much of their attention on violent criminals, but the mission has broadened.

Many of the officers are assigned to prevent crimes against livery-cab drivers by patrolling in unmarked cars and stopping cabs when they suspect a driver might be in trouble. Others are put in a variety of settings in which the police need to expand their plainclothes presence, like in the stands at Shea Stadium when John Rocker of the Atlanta Braves takes the mound.

10/6/2000 NEW YORK

(AP) Mayor Rudolph Giuliani refused to apologize Friday for telling reporters that as many as 2 in 5 black men questioned by police searching for a hypothetical black rape suspect could be arrested for some crime...On Thursday, during a 30-minute talk in which he denied reports that the Police Department's Street Crime Unit has engaged in racial profiling of suspects, Giuliani used the hypothetical example of a rape suspect on the Upper West Side who he described as ''6-foot-2, African-American, roughly 35 years old.'' Giuliani said: ''What is going to happen in order to find that person is a lot of people are going to be approached. You are going to have to search for people, you are going to have to interview people, you are going to have to ask them questions. When you approach some of them to ask questions, you may be frightened about the fact that maybe they have a gun, maybe they don't have a gun. So you frisk them. Sometimes you do find a gun. ''In the course of looking for that one rapist, you may arrest 30, 40 people. You may approach 100 people. But who are you going to be focusing on? You are not going to be focusing on a 70-year-old white male, if in fact the report is that the rapist is a 35-year-old African-American male. And that happens in large percentages, and that is what drives what's going on.'' Giuliani's comments contradict Police Department statistics. In 1998, the Street Crime Unit made 45,000 stop-and-frisk searches although 35,000 of those stops, or about 78 percent, did not result in arrests. About 90 percent of those stopped were blacks and Latinos.

To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays

Important Note:
Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff.

Robert Lederman is an artist, a regular columnist for the Greenwich Village Gazette [See: http://www.gvny.com/ for an extensive archive of Lederman columns] The Shadow, The African Sun Times, The Vigo-Examiner [see: http://www.vigo-examiner.com/archive.htm] and Street News, and is the author of hundreds of published essays concerning Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Lederman has been falsely arrested 41 times to date for his anti-Giuliani activities and has never been convicted of any of the charges. He is best known for creating hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator.

Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net

For a detailed exposition on the West Nile issue
http://www.nospray.org/
For an article on the Manhattan Institute go to
http://www.konformist.com/2000/rudyg.htm

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