Crime Is Down; Resentment Is Up
Two debates, now hopelessly entwined, are swirling around the Amadou Diallo case in New York. One is about police tactics and the level of police aggressiveness that communities are willing to tolerate in order to cut crime. The other is about race and politics.
Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, was gunned down in a fusillade of 41 bullets fired by four white cops, members of an aggressive street-crime unit pursuing a serial rapist. The four cops, who declined to talk to a grand jury, have been indicted for second-degree murder. They may have shot in panic, and could have mistaken their own ricocheting bullets as return fire. For two weeks, crowds have shown up at police headquarters to protest the shooting, and almost 800 have been arrested for civil disobedience.
Almost no one thinks this was an intentional or racial killing. But many think it shows that blacks are much more likely than whites to suffer at the hands of police. It’s easy to dismiss the Rev. Al Sharpton, the racial huckster who organized the protests and civil disobedience over this case. It’s harder to dismiss the Rev. Floyd Flake, a solid moderate and an ally of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who joined the protests because “I don’t want my sons to be victims of police brutality.”
The numbers don’t support charges of police recklessness. More than 93 percent of the city’s 40,000 cops never fire their gun over their entire careers. Last year’s rate of shootings per thousand police officers was the second lowest in 25 years, lower than Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia and Washington. New York’s percentage of police shootings in relation to population is the lowest of any large police department in the country. But the Rev. Flake says that middle-class black communities like his are up in arms over police treatment of minorities, so “the perception has become a reality that must be addressed.”
That perception seems to be based mainly on the high percentage of minorities stopped on the street and frisked by police. The stop-and-frisk policy has been remarkably successful in getting guns off the street. But it involves a trade-off between reducing the number of guns and increasing the resentment toward police. Professor Richard Uviller of Columbia University Law School thinks a 10-to-1 ratio of stops to guns is tolerable and effective, though he says some communities would consider 5-to-1 too high. But the New York police numbers for street-unit stops in 1997 were 16-to-1, and the 1998 numbers reached 29-to-1, partly because the unit expanded and had more officers making more stops.
It’s hard to imagine a community that would endorse numbers like this. Policy is now geared to producing massive resentment and very few guns. Because blacks and Hispanics disproportionately live in high-crime areas, they feel the brunt of the stop-and-frisk policy and perceive it as primarily racial. The New York Daily News polled a hundred young black and Hispanic men, and 81 said they had been stopped and frisked at least once.
The lesson is that aggressive policing can’t be conducted without the consent and approval of the communities involved. Because of the lack of consent, the minority communities that benefit the most from drastically lower crime are the ones most opposed to police efforts. There are also questions about whether the street crime program lost some restraint and control when it tripled in size a few years ago. Another question is why it needed to triple at all with crime rates declining.
But protests are hardly confined to changes in police procedures or police misconduct. Many protesters want to delegitimize Giuliani’s mayoralty. Reporters have noted that few protest signs mention Diallo, but a lot of them attack the mayor, sometimes as “Adolf Giuliani.”
Giuliani’s brought some of this on himself. He’s a very smart, stiff-necked, thin-skinned former prosecutor who prefers to attack rather than listen. The smooth political touch eludes him. He foolishly derided the protesters as “silly” and the protests as “stunts.” His police commissioner tried to duck a City Council hearing on Diallo and took off on a junket to see the Oscars.
The core of the opposition to Giuliani is the liberal establishment that never wanted him elected in the first place. The establishment has been quiet since Giuliani managed to cut crime and welfare so dramatically.
Criminologist George Kelling thinks that the empire is striking back: The “root-cause liberals” who insisted that the crime rate could not be brought down without massive anti-poverty spending are outraged that Giuliani has decisively proved them wrong. The liberals tended to tolerate high crime rates as the inevitable symptoms of racism and poverty. Now their argument is that crime rates can be brought down only by police tactics that violate civil rights.
Giuliani has been personally damaged, and Al Sharpton, loud supporter of the Tawana Brawley hoax and other racial adventures, has unexpectedly been rehabilitated. Now respectable blacks and visiting celebrity protesters are following his lead. Suddenly the vastly popular crime-control measures that brought the city back from the brink of disaster seem vulnerable. As Kelling says, we are watching an ideological attack on a successful philosophy of policing. Stay tuned.