This T-shirt making the rounds
on the Lower East Side
tries to explain what causes
Kops to act the way they do.
On July 1, 1996, the London-based human rights watchdog group Amnesty International released the findings of its investigation into "allegations of ill-treatment, deaths in custody, and unjustified shootings by police officers in the New York City Police Department." This low-keyed report is careful to genuflect toward the NYPD, saying Amnesty International recognizes that the police in New York City have a difficult and often dangerous job and that most encounters be-tween officers and members of the public do not result in allegations of misconduct." It then continues with over 70 pages of facts that often overlap with information reported in The SHADOW's KOP WATCH pages over the years. Amnesty Interna-tional's report is the culmination of an 18-month investigation in which AI delegates met with lawyers for people alleging police brutality, members of civil rights groups, offi-cials from the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau and the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the office of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the Bronx District Attorney's Office. More than 90 individual cases were of ill-treatment were reviewed by Amnesty's dele-gates. AI states, "the information gathered suggests that police bruta-lity and unjustifiable force...is a widespread problem, with a pattern of similar abuses occurring over many years." Much of Amnesty's information is reported in the form of numbers. The amount paid out by the city, for instance, in settlements or judge-ments awarded to plaintiffs in police misconduct cases rose from 13.5 million dollars in 1992 to more than 25 million dollars in 1994. Another telling set of numbers relates to the racial composition of the NYPD. In 1995, the department was 72.2% white, 15.2% Latino, 11.5% African-American, and 7.7% "other including Asian." Meanwhile, we live in a city that is 43.2% white, 28.7% African-American, 24.4% Latino, and 7.7% "other, including Asian." Other information comes in the form of names and incidents, many of which are familiar to SHADOW readers. Noted in the report are the cases of Grady Alexis, a young Haitian artist beaten to death on the street by an off-duty cop; Carlton Brown, an unlicensed minivan driver who was thrown through a plate glass window by Brooklyn cops; and Christopher Henelly, who suffered permanent brain damage from being bludgeoned by police who charged into a demonstration sponsored by ACT-UP in 1991. In addition to these beatings, a number of deaths in cus-tody are documented, including that of Anthony Baez, killed by a police chokehold after a football that he was kicking around hit a cop car. The Amnesty report also reported on a string of police shootings--for in-stance, the one that killed 16-year old Brooklyn honor student Yong Xin Huang, who was shot at close range with an NYPD-issue 9-mm Glock semiautomatic while playing with an air rifle in the driveway of a friend's home. Amnesty also details the sad saga of the Civilian Complaint Re-view Board (CCRB), which reviewed and disposed of 3961 complaints from January to June 1995, less than one third of which proceeded to full investigation. Of the ones that were fully investigated, 9.3% were ruled "substantiated," 7.7% "un-founded," and 75.8% "unsubstanti-ated" because of insufficient evi-dence (not surprising in view of the cutbacks in investigative resources for the CCRB under the Giuliani Ad-ministration). Among those cases that were substantiated and referred to the Police Commissioner for action in 1994, only 40% went to ad-ministrative trial and of these, 69% were dismissed by the police brass. Only three cops were actually convicted of anything at administra-tive trial in 1994. Amnesty International's recom-mendations include the appointment of an independent inquiry into police brutality and excessive force by the New York City authorities, stern words from the police brass that excessive force will not be tolerated, the strengthening of the CCRB as an investigative body, more public scrutiny of internal police investi-gations, and changes in the ethnic composition of the NYPD. Amnesty does not make any recommenda-tions regarding the Giuliani admini-stration's law enforcement policies--the so-called "quality-of-life initi-ative," which has made harsh con-tact between the police department and the general population much more common in New York City. The importance of this international re-cognition of the problem of police brutality in NYC, however, cannot be discounted.