Re: Fwd: [BRC-ANN] Statement on New York Festival Attacks

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Daniel Davies wrote:

> This looks like a call to action, but it's actually a call to *inaction*.
> We're being called on to "struggle with contradictions", a damnably
> pointless activity if ever there was one.  The problem here is that the
> group wants severe penalties for offences, but doesn't want them to be
> inflicted on people.  Or more likely, that this sentence represents a
> consensus between people who want to chop the knackers off the Central Park
> mob and people who don't want anyone to be arrested for anything ever.

No, the problem is that while feminists of color want those who
committed sexual assaults to be arrested for their crimes, we don't
want this incident to be used as an excuse for looking at all young
men of color as if they were criminals or potential criminals and for
continuing the policy of zero tolerance & war on crime and drugs.
Two legitimate desires, if you ask me.  The manner in which the
attacks on women in the Central Park get discussed should concern all
of us who see a problem in the growth of prisoners in America,
because it will have an effect on more people than the actual
attackers in this case.  In case you are not aware of how the media,
police, & politicians may use the Central Park assaults, see below:

*****   The New York Times
June 15, 2000, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 27; Column 1; Editorial Desk
HEADLINE: The Vigilance That Can't Let Up
BYLINE:  By William J. Bratton;  William J. Bratton was New York
police commissioner from 1994 to 1996.

The outrageous and violent behavior of a large gang of young men who
were totally out of control in Central Park on Sunday was a troubling
reminder of the bad old days that most New Yorkers, myself included,
had felt were behind us. It seems inconceivable that over two dozen
women could have been assaulted in broad daylight. Fear is now
consuming the public -- a fear that was compounded by a weekend that
also saw seven homicides and 28 shootings in the city.

When I first came to New York from Boston in 1990 as chief of the
Transit Police, the city was still reeling from the Central Park
jogger case. A woman running in the park had been viciously assaulted
and left for dead by a marauding "wolf pack," as the gangs of young
men roaming the streets and subways had come to be known. Their
"wilding" attacks came to epitomize just how unsafe New York had
become and contributed to a pervasive fear.

So deeply scarred was the city by the jogger incident and other
crimes symbolizing a city out of control that even now one weekend of
violence can shatter our still fragile belief that we have truly
turned a corner, that New York is, as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
correctly proclaims, "the safest large city in America."

In dealing with the crime of the 1980's and early 1990's, the police
and politicians learned not only to improve their response to crime
but to accept responsibility for controlling it and to focus more of
their efforts on preventing it. Government, not the mob, must control
the streets.

What is particularly troubling about Sunday's incident, which took
place amid the crowds that remained in Midtown after the annual
National Puerto Rican Day Parade, is the apparent deficiency of both
the crowd control strategies that the Police Department has become so
famous for and the initial response (or lack of it) by some officers
to the victims' reported pleas for assistance.

The horror for the victims subjected to sexual assault and
degradation is that the memories will stay with them forever. The
tragedy for New York itself is that as videotapes of the attacks have
been widely broadcast (some of the victims were European tourists,
and their ordeals were widely covered at home), the still forming
image of a safer city has been tarnished around the world.

The truth is that New York is a much safer city than it was a decade
ago. But we must also focus on perception. The reality for the
victims of Sunday's assaults is that they happened; overall crime
statistics are of no consolation to them. The perception of most
other New Yorkers, particularly women, is that somehow in a day New
York became a much more threatening place.

The mayor and the Police Department must move aggressively to
investigate not only the incident itself but police planning and
actions. New York's police are practiced in tactics that are known to
work in managing large gatherings like New Year's Eve in Times Square
or the big parades.

Before any such event, a strong message must go out that law breaking
and drunkenness will not be tolerated. At the event itself, there
must be a strong and visible police presence to control the ground
and make sure rowdiness has no chance to get out of hand. Afterward,
officers should not be relieved of duty until it is confirmed that
there is no longer a need for police presence in a particular area.
And all day there must be continuous reassessment and follow-up to
make sure that problems and disturbances have not migrated to areas
with thinner police coverage.

But as the investigation determines where the lapses were on Sunday,
the mayor and the police must also, through their expressions of
outrage, sympathy and determination to get at the facts, begin to
deal with the fear. Fear, if left unchecked, will allow perception to
overcome reality.

The public needs meaningful reassurance that Sunday's crime spree is
not a precursor of more bad times ahead. The Police Department must
use the events as a spur to remain constantly vigilant and not be
lulled into a sense of complacency. The statistics and the
accomplishments of the past deserve to be celebrated, but they cannot
be substituted for a Police Department that is compassionate to
victims, responsive to the public and intolerant at all times of
criminal behavior.   *****

*****   The New York Times
June 17, 2000, Saturday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk
HEADLINE: A Volatile Mixture Exploded Into Rampage in Central Park
BYLINE:  By DAVID BARSTOW and C. J. CHIVERS

....Even as detectives continue to round up suspects -- 8 more were
arrested yesterday, bringing the total to 16 -- another police
investigation is focusing on how the 4,000 police officers assigned
to the parade were deployed, when officers were sent home and how
senior commanders communicated with one another about the movements
of more than a million people.

"We're going to critique this very closely to make sure that it
doesn't happen in the future," Police Commissioner Howard Safir said
this week.

Any examination of the department's performance during and after the
parade will have to try to reconcile a certain indisputable level of
enforcement -- the department wrote hundreds of citations for public
drinking, which is illegal -- with a widespread sense among people at
and around the parade that gross misconduct went virtually ignored.

All week, for instance, city officials have battled direct or
implicit accusations that the police deliberately took a hands-off
approach because of the department's tense relations with minority
groups.

Mr. Giuliani has strongly disputed this notion, and police officials
have provided statistics showing, if anything, a history of somewhat
tougher enforcement.

During this year's St. Patrick's Day Parade, for example, the police
confiscated 200 open alcohol containers, compared with 2,601
confiscations during this year's Puerto Rican parade.

"Maybe we're in a period of time in which the police can't win," Mr.
Giuliani said yesterday on his weekly radio program.

Police officials said there was no letup this year, and according to
police figures, officers issued hundreds more summonses for petty
crimes and noise complaints than they did at last year's parade.

There have been "a lot of complaints fairly recently that the police
have become too strict in quality of life enforcement," one police
official said. "That in my mind is one of the main things that keeps
the control of various types of events, such as parades, such as New
Year's Eve in Times Square. The enforcement is necessary. That helps
to set the tone."

But according to a growing number of witnesses, police officers
failed again and again on Sunday to provide even the mildest of
responses to scenes of obvious disorder and lawlessness.

What's more, several witnesses have alleged in interviews this week,
some officers failed to react to specific complaints about women
being mistreated and harassed.

"Is it normal to just turn the city over to those kinds of people?"
asked Mrs. Brown, of Texas, expressing one common view.

The Police Department reported that it made one marijuana arrest
during the parade and confiscated 16 bags of marijuana. But many
witnesses described dozens, if not hundreds, of people openly smoking
marijuana, many of them in plain view of police officers.

"I was concerned about secondhand smoke, that's how bad it was," said
Shelly English, 37, who was jogging in Central Park on Sunday.

Deputy Chief Thomas P. Fahey, a department spokesman, denied those
claims, arguing that it did not make sense for officers to ignore
blatant drug use. "If I have a parade detail and I walk my route and
smell marijuana, I'd go ballistic," he said. "Why? Because I know my
boss is going to come along soon, and if he smells something, he's
going to ask me what the hell I'm doing."

Special police teams, each with 24 officers, roved along the parade
route, confiscating open alcohol containers and writing summonses,
but many thousands more teenagers and young people clearly drank
alcohol with impunity, many people at the parade said.

Some men circulated in the crowds openly hawking miniature bottles of
rum and vodka. "There was alcohol all over the street, bottles of
liquor, people offering shots," said Nathan Poe, 27, a Web site
developer from Brooklyn.

Chief Fahey said that officers sometimes decide, quite properly, that
it is a better use of their time to direct traffic than to go after
someone with an open can of beer.

But police officials have acknowledged in interviews that the
department's tactical and strategic decisions may have contributed to
a set of circumstances that permitted some of the worst incidents of
violence to go forward unchecked....   *****

From these two examples, you get a hint of how public discourse on
the Central Park attacks on women get framed by the media, police,
and politicians: no attention to sexism, but lots of attention to the
need for zero tolerance.  I wonder how discussion is proceeding among
NY feminists about how to reconcile the need for arrest of the men
who committed the crimes with the urgent need to stop zero tolerance
and more generally the wars on drugs & crime.

Yoshie