Broken Policing

Recent protests, including against New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, reflect frustrations about racist criminal justice that have been building up for decades.In 1992, at a rally called by the PBA, ten thousand off-duty cops surrounded New York City Hall to protest then-Mayor David Dinkins' decision to establish an independent (not internal to NYPD) Civilian Complaint Review Board to investigate allegations of police misconduct.The protesters shut down the Brooklyn Bridge for nearly an hour and beat up two reporters.The nearly three hundred officers on duty took no action to control the crowd.I was working in City Hall in the Mayor's Office at the time.I saw a protester holding a racially inflammatory sign depicting Mayor Dinkins as a washroom attendant.Una Clarke, a West Indian City Council member, was chased into City Hall by off-duty cops calling her a "nigger bitch."The next day, September 19, the New York Times editorial board wrote, "Rudolph Giuliani, the potential candidate for mayor, addressed the crowd but failed to speak out sternly against disorder and racism.Now he claims, implausibly, that he wasn't aware officers were out of control."The disorder charge did not stick to Giuliani or to the police.A little more than a year later, Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York on a law-and-order platform.Mayor Giuliani tapped Bill Bratton to be the NYPD Commissioner.Bratton had been hired by David Dinkins in 1990 to run the Transit Police, where he aggressively implemented the approach popularly known as "broken windows" policing.Dinkins had hired a nationally known advocate for community policing, Lee 579993N LFXXX10.