by Robert Lederman(3/16/99), President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)<ARTISTpres@aol.com>
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It can't be easy being a police officer at this time in New York City history. The job is dangerous, highly stressful and puts one in the midst of conflict every day. Adding to the stress is the fact that police officers are accountable to their commanding officers, to judges and district attorneys, to the general public that pays their salaries and to the political bosses dictating the policies they must enforce on the street every day.
If police officers want to be respected members of the community rather than to be seen as soldiers in an occupying army, they must be seen to be enforcing fair laws and doing so without prejudice or favoritism. The public isn't blind; when they see police work benefiting them police enjoy the public's respect and admiration. When the public sees police work being done primarily to further a Mayor's political ambitions, to increase the profits of self-serving business interests or as expressions of racial bias, the social contract unravels. The law itself is seen as unjust and people come to see police officers as their enemies.
Today the NYPD is under attack, accused of racism, racial profiling and even murder. When four officers from the Street Crimes Unit shot an unarmed West African street vendor 41 times at close range they worsened a perception that was already making every well-intentioned New York City police officer's job extremely difficult. The purpose of this letter is to clarify my position and that of the group A.R.T.I.S.T. on this controversy and to urge police officers to join the public debate rather than being intimidated into silence.
The person to blame is Rudy Giuliani.
Allegations of racial prejudice in relation to the NYPD are not simply a matter of the attitudes held by individual police officers but of the motivations behind NYPD policy. The NYPD operates on a strict chain of command. No matter how high their rank, police officers don't decide on their own what they do each day or who they'll do it to. The blame for the growing perception that the NYPD is racist can be traced to one person. He's the man on the balcony taking all the bows; the man who's prepared to claim full credit for anything good police do, yet remains unwilling to take the blame for anything that's wrong.
Under Giuliani the police have been given a new mission. Their job is not so much to serve and protect the public as to persecute punish and extract money from it. Under constant pressure to enhance the Mayor's statistical "results", not just criminals but law-abiding people are now routinely treated by the police as "perps". For black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers the treatment is especially disgraceful. Many Giuliani policies rely on the practice of deliberately violating civil rights guaranteed by the NY and United States Constitutions. Is it any wonder so many people call Giuliani a dictator and see the police as if they were hostile troops? When he's not ordering you to arrest homeless people, musicians and street artists, or to seize and auction off people's cars, he's got you suppressing lawful demonstrations, telling pedestrians how to cross the street, harassing cabbies and vendors, raiding bars or bulldozing community gardens. Behind these policies is a sinister agenda. It doesn't originate within the NYPD but within the powerful corporations and real estate interests for whom Giuliani is merely a hired servant. For them, this is a matter of business. These corporate interests believe driving blacks and Latinos out of certain areas of the City increases real estate values; that it's more profitable to build prisons to incarcerate tens of thousands of non-violent inner city youths than to build schools and decent housing or to provide real jobs; that it's "an investment in the future" to cut the budgets for public schools, libraries and hospitals while granting billions in tax write-offs to fabulously wealthy corporations; that privatizing public schools, parks and sidewalks and letting corporate interests exploit them for profit, "improves quality of life". To make up for all the tax money Giuliani gives away to those who are already rich, the police must fulfill ever-higher quotas, literally issuing millions of summonses each year. Like a reverse robin hood, Giuliani steals from the poor and gives to the rich. To maintain the endless flow of statistics Giuliani's false reputation is based on, there must be arrest quotas as well. Having no respect for the law, it doesn't matter to Giuliani that most of the hundreds of thousands of arrests he's ordered were thrown out of court because they blatantly violated legal procedure or didn't even involve an actual crime. Those statistics are never allowed to be released to the public.
Giuliani's policies have done no more to increase police officers paychecks than to increase the respect they get from the public. Giuliani and his corporate bosses use the police as pawns. For police officers the end result of this process is having to face the hostility of millions of New Yorkers who feel they are now being victimized as much by the police as by criminals. Long after Giuliani is secure in his next job, the men and women of the NYPD will be reaping the fruit of the rotten seeds Rudy planted.
The Street Crimes Unit was doing political work, not police work, the night they killed Amadou Diallo. A number of high profile rapes were causing a sour note in the "crime is down, Rudy Giuliani saved New York" theme. The Street Crimes Unit wasn't sent to Diallo's neighborhood to stop rapes but to stop bad press. As NYPD Commissioner Safir told the media after a 22 year old white female was stabbed in the back on 3/10, "It certainly doesn't play well in the Midwest". Giuliani and Safir are running a propaganda machine, not a police force. In minority neighborhoods rapes and even murders are barely investigated unless they generate embarrassing publicity for the Mayor. Once that happens, the entire NYPD may be put on the case.
No one is suggesting that the police should stop enforcing the law or allow criminals to go unpunished. To the extent that crime was reduced in minority neighborhoods residents have obviously been grateful to the police. However, you can't expect law-abiding people who are being illegally stopped, searched, verbally abused, threatened, beaten and sometimes killed by the police to focus on the good you've done. If the NYPD treated white middle class New Yorkers the way they've treated minority New Yorkers during the past six years there would have been an armed citizen's rebellion against the police, the Mayor would be facing felony charges and the Police Commissioner would be in jail. Rudy's corporate patrons and campaign contributors would be facing racketeering and conspiracy charges far more serious than John Gotti ever did.
It's likely that only a very small percentage of police officers in the NYPD are actually racists. Nevertheless, police officers who are not prejudiced themselves but enforce racist policies and help cover up civil rights abuses committed by fellow officers, are supporting racism. That, more than the four white police officers who in a moment of terrible misjudgment killed an unarmed 22 year-old black man, is why there are daily protests.
To save your professional reputations as well as the civil order of this City, I call on all members of the NYPD to denounce the racist, immoral and illegal policies of Rudy Giuliani and his retinue of lapdogs and henchmen. Don't wait for your compromised union officials, your career-obsessed NYPD brass, or your imported fire Chief Police Commissioner to speak up for you. Contrary to the orders you've been given, as American citizens you are entitled by law to freely express your beliefs and opinions. If you don't explain to the media and the public about what's really going on in the Giuliani police state you can't blame people for believing that you support his policies and may even enjoy enforcing them. It's your call. Decide to speak for yourself or understand that if you don't, everyone else will continue to speak for you.
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
e mail: ARTISTpres@aol.com
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html