NY police torture immigrant
By Barry Sheppard
In the early morning hours of August 10, a Haitian immigrant in New York, Abner Louima, was outside a nightclub in a largely black and immigrant section of Brooklyn after a party. As the club emptied out, a fight broke out between two women. "I didn't know the women", Louima later recalled from his hospital bed.
Soon the cops arrived. "The white cops started with some racial stuff", Louima said. "They said, 'Why do you people come to this country if you can't speak English?' They called us niggers.
"A cop said to shut up. I didn't think he was talking to me. He pushed me to the ground and handcuffed my hands. Two cops put me in their patrol car and drove me to the corner of Glenwood and Nostrand. There was another car there. They kicked and beat me with their radios. They were yelling, 'You people can't even talk English. I am going to teach you to respect a cop.' None of the cops had name tags on. They put me back in the car and drove me to the corner of Glenwood and Bedford. They met two other cops and beat me again."
Bloody, he was then driven to the police station, led to the duty sergeant's desk, and strip-searched.
"My pants were down at my ankles, in full view of the other cops. They walked me over to the bathroom and closed the door. There were two cops. One said, 'You niggers have to learn to respect police officers'. The other said, 'If you yell or make any noise, I will kill you'. Then one held me and the other one stuck the [toilet] plunger up my behind. He pulled it out and shoved it in my mouth, broke my teeth and said, 'That's your shit, nigger'. Later, when they called the ambulance, the cop told me, 'If you ever tell anyone I will kill you and your family'."
Louima suffered ruptures in his intestine and bladder. But the cops took hours to get him to a hospital, and initially said that they found him already hurt as a result of gay sex. This story was dropped as they then brought charges against the victim for resisting arrest.
Louima was whisked into emergency surgery, which saved his life. He has had to undergo further surgery in the weeks since, and he remains in hospital.
The police Internal Affairs Bureau, which is supposed to look into cases of police abuse but is in reality a cover-up agency, initially said it received a report on the incident some 36 hours after the torture occurred. This lie had to be dropped when a nurse came forward to report that she had called Internal Affairs right after Louima was admitted to the hospital.
The nurse also reported that she was under pressure from hospital authorities to keep silent.
Police regulations require that Internal Affairs and other ranking police commanders be notified if a prisoner has been seriously injured. This was not done either.
So the cops at the station house had 36 hours to "disappear" the evidence and concoct their stories.
What blew the case open was the decision by Louima and his family to call in the press, which got the story from him at his hospital bedside.
Finally, charges were brought against the two officers who committed the torture. They, along with two other officers, are also charged with beating Louima on the way to the station.
Mayor Rudoplh Giuliani had to denounce the violence in the face of public outrage, especially in the city's large Haitian population.
In many previous instances of police brutality and murder, Giuliani has defended the cops, as part of his "get tough on crime" political ploy. Cops have been encouraged to act as judge, jury and executioner on the streets in instances of petty crime, or, as in this case, of no crime at all.
One of the cops who was beating Louima shouted, "This is Giuliani time, not Dinkins time". Dinkins, who is black, was the former mayor.
Giuliani and police commissioner Howard Safir deny that there is any pattern of police brutality, and assert that the Louima case is an isolated one. They also claim that there is no "blue wall" of silence in the police department that protects cops who commit crimes.
But only two officers in the precinct where the atrocity took place have come forward to offer evidence against those accused, and they have been placed in protective custody to prevent their fellow officers from killing them.
Generations of judges and senior police officials have turned a blind eye to police brutality, and the cops know it. Every so often a commission gets set up to study the problem, but nothing gets done.
The Internal Affairs Bureau, for example, was supposed to have cleaned up its act after a 1994 report by the Mollen Commission called it a "do nothing" agency.
The Mollen Commission found that cops often "are violent simply for the sake of violence".
An exchange between commission investigators and a particularly brutal cop went as follows:
"Did you beat people up who you arrested?"
"No. We'd just beat people in general. If they're on the street, hanging around drug locations. It was a show of force.
"Why were those beatings done?"
"To show who was in charge. We were in charge, the police."
The report also described how a group of officers "sliced an escape rope hanging from a drug dealer's window so that anyone who used it would plunge to the ground. They also once raided a brothel in uniform, ordered the men to leave and the women to line up. The cops then picked their victim of choice and proceeded to terrorize and rape them without compunction."
In another instance, cops went into a building "swinging nightsticks and fists, simply to pass the night away".
The pattern of police brutality stems from the function of the police in capitalist society to keep the class struggle "in bounds". To do that, the police must be trained to see themselves as a special privileged elite in a perpetual war against the majority, and especially those on the bottom.