PLUNGER PIGS PORK POPULACE


By A. Kronstadt



    The torture of Abner Louima at the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn
was just one extreme of a bell curve of injury and humiliation
visited upon the people in the interest of Giuliani and his
quality of life campaign. The mayor's crackdown on everything,
once believed by all responsible New Yorkers to be the key cause
of New York's exponentially declining crime rate, has now shown a
much uglier face. 
    The SHADOW has long had an interest in cases of police
brutality. Since the Tompkins Square police riot of 1988, in
which hundreds of Lower East Side residents were beaten by
runaway police who covered their badges, we have accumulated
bulging files full of information about acts of misconduct on and
off the job by the police. All of which proves statistically that
the documented crime rate among members of the NYPD is at least
as great as that among the populace as a whole. We have covered
in depth the tearful case of Anthony Baez, a law-abiding man
whose ordinary peaceful life ran afoul of, and came to a young
end, because of Giuliani's new style of policing. However, we
never in our most wild anti-authoritarian rantings ever
foreshadowed that NYC cops would do anything as depraved as what
they did to Abner Louima.
    Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Giuliani has, through sheer invasive deployment of cops, cut back
on the rights of New Yorkers to an unheard of extent. He has
terrorized panhandlers from the subway and (most) peddlers from
the streets of the Lower East Side. New Yorkers talk in hushed
voices about marijuana these days. On May 5, armies of cops
converged on the now-outlawed Washington Square Smoke-In and made
mass arrests. In Ozone Park, a conservative Italian neighborhood
in Queens noted in past for its fourth of july fireworks, cops on
horseback circulated through the streets and helicopters hovered
overhead to squelch the festivities. Phalanxes of cops worked the
St. Patrick's and Puerto Rican Day Parades, confiscating beer and
making busts. At one time, cops would rather allow demonstrators
to take over a street than use violence--now they would rather
use pepper spray. Giuliani has taken advantage of the
38,000-strong police force that was created under his predecessor
David Dinkins and has used it to construct his own wet dream of
governmental control. 
    And Rudy has given the pigs power hardons as stiff as plunger
handles. Rudy gave them those dark blue, almost black uniforms
that have powerful sexual undertones well known among leather men
and nazi regalia freaks. In Greg Donaldson's book The Ville,
about cops and kids in Brownsville, a pre-Giuliani cop is quoted
as saying, "the LAPD gets more respect than we do... Look at
their uniforms. They wear black for the fear factor. We wear
powder-blue shirts lake a fuckin' buncha pussies." Giuliani has
given the cops a sense of being public masters instead of public
servants. Nobody dares talk back to a New York cop these days.
You see them walking around the Lower East Side in big packs,
three, four and five of them surrounding two guys sharing a beer.
If one of them busts a guy urinating on a wall, he radios for
reinforcements. 
    You need a certain kind of person to go around fucking with
the populace like this. You need a person who is a bit of a Black
Shirt. Lest this be misinterpreted as a slur on Italians,
remember that the job of the Black Shirts was to terrorize and
brutalize Italians who refused to accept fascism. The Black
Shirts would capture people, haul them down to the police
station, force them to drink castor oil, then throw them into the
street incontinent. Another thing the Black Shirts did was to
insert pool cues into the anuses of men whom they suspected of
being homosexuals. To achieve total control, the authority figure
must totally take away the dignity and humanity of its enemies.
They must heap insult upon injury.
    What New York needs above all other things is a vision of a
harmonious society that goes beyond police control. When all you
have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The idea
that education and opportunity, not jails, is the most effective
way to fight crime has become a joke for New York City officials.
Lacking, or fearing any vision of a better world, the bankers and
brokers who control the city have granted a blank check to dumb,
brutish police.
    Barring a massive reordering of priority from jails to
schools and employment opportunities, SHADOW Kop Watchers would
like to see the following measures adopted by the city for the
public's protection:

1. Review all cops' complaint records. Disarm the ones with the
top 20% of complaints and give them desk jobs.
2. Get rid of the quality of life campaign. Stop arresting
peddlers, pot smokers, beer drinkers, and panhandlers. No more
cops picking on the people.
3. Make them leave their guns at the precinct when their shift
ends.
4. Revamp the psychological tests to weed out the psychos and let
in more critical thinkers.
5. Get rid of the Irish/Italian dynasty of Long and Staten Island
pigs and hire more residents of New York City.