Stories2

By Leonard Pitts
Miami Herald
Sunday, April 2, 2000

I was in Rudolph Giuliani's fair city a couple of weeks ago. Had a layover at
Penn Station and trudged over to Times Square to grab some dinner. The thing
I remember most is that you couldn't go six feet without seeing a cop. I'm
talking police everywhere.

In 20-something years of traveling in and out of New York City, I had never
felt quite as safe. Or as unsettled.

It didn't help that this was a few weeks after the acquittal of four officers
in the case of Amadou Diallo and a scant two days after the shooting death of
Patrick Dorismond. Many observers see a troubling pattern here: Dorismond,
Diallo and a fellow named Malcolm Ferguson, three unarmed black men shot to
death by New York City police in the past 13 months. Add to that the
broomstick sodomy of Abner Louima in 1997 and you have all the elements for a
new installment of an old argument: that police are routinely guilty of
brutality against black men.

It's a point that seems beyond serious debate to me, but let's leave that
aside for the moment. Because here's the thing that makes me wonder: Today,
it's black men in New York City; tomorrow, it's who, and where?

It's not a question I've heard before. Nor is the silence surprising. In the
past few years, crime has fallen to historic lows in this country. Who wants
to rock that boat? Whatever police are doing, it has had a salutary effect on
our ability to walk the streets, and isn't that the only thing that matters?

Some folks would say that it is. Reminds me of the old line about sausage --
if you ever saw how it's made, you'd never enjoy it again. The same, I think,
is true of justice.

So you get the sense that brutality complaints from minority people in urban
areas reach the rest of the country only as a dimly heard cry. Something you
know you ought to care about and yet you find it difficult to do so. Or else
you defiantly refuse to care, figuring that the victims must've had it
coming.

The latter mindset is most clearly exemplified by the behavior of Giuliani.
After the Dorismond shooting, the tyrant of the Big Apple released sealed
information from the man's juvenile police record. It was an arrogant and
astonishingly mean-spirited attempt to put the victim on trial, to suggest
that because of what he did as a teen-ager, the 26-year-old Dorismond somehow
deserved to be shot to death.

But the question here isn't what kind of man Patrick Dorismond was. Rather,
it's what kind of men and women do we have as police? The question isn't, is
he out of control, but are they?

New York City's woes, combined with a mushrooming police scandal in Los
Angeles, lend that question pungent urgency. Both suggest that it's past time
for a tough, constructive public dialogue about the tactics, training and
oversight of these most vital of public employees. Among those who would
benefit most from such a dialogue: the thousands of good cops for whom a
tough job is made tougher by a handful of undisciplined rogues.

Because it gets harder every day to tell justice from sausage, and if your
solution is simply to avoid looking, then you become part of the problem. And
contrary to what you might think, it is your problem. It's a fallacy to
believe ill-trained, poorly supervised, out-of-control law officers will
confine their misbehavior to certain people in certain places. If they get
away with it on one side of the tracks, what's to stop them from trying it on
the other? So from where I sit, Dorismond, Diallo and the others are like
canaries in a coal mine whose fate we ignore at our own peril.

At the end of the day, the issue isn't race, culture or geography, but the
right of every law-abiding citizen to be secure in his or her own body. In
recent years, the police have done an admirable job of protecting us from
those who would steal that security.

Now, who will protect us from our protectors?

Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald. You may contact him at
leonardpitts@mindspring.com

By using CellPals YOU agree to hold CellPals and its owner, and employees harmless from all costs, damages, liabilities, and attorney fees resulting from advertisements and results of this service. In no event will CellPals be responsible for any accidental, consequential, exemplary, or other damages arising from or relating to your use of this service. The ads placed on CellPals! are written by the inmates and we are only the means by which their ads are published. We at CellPals! accept no responsibility for the accuracy of any content found within these pages. The appropriate safeguards should be used in communicating with any person(s) that you may meet through this service. By using this service, you agree to not hold us responsible for any costs, liabilities, attorney's fee or damages that you may incur. To use this service you must be at least 18 years of age. CellPals urges you to use caution when using any interpersonal services on the internet. CellPals reserves the right to refuse service and remove from CellPals services at anytime anyone for any reason deemed appropriate by CellPals management. Abuse will not be tolerated. All sites are, and will remain, the property of CellPals. Press Release For Members of the Media By following any link on http://www.cellpals.com, or any other pages within CellPals, you have agreed to these terms.
CellPals© All Rights Reserved 1999-2005

Go back to the Home Page | Comments Email: Webmaster | Advertise on CellPals.Com | Press Release For Members of the Media and Mission Statement