The 1997 National Crime Victimisation Survey, the Justice Department's annual statistical report, shows that cities all across the US have experienced a dramatic drop in violent crime. Last year, for example, not a single teenager committed murder in the city of Boston. In New York murders and shootings have dropped by about 50 percent over the last three years, a turnaround now referred to by mainstream commentators as 'the New York miracle'. Government officials, such as New York's mayor Rudolph Giuliani, are quick to conclude that the fall in crime is a direct result of harsher laws which have led to a quadrupling of the prison population in the US since the 1970s. With 5.1 million people - including one in every three young black men - now either in prison, on probation or on parole, the logic goes, the criminals are all being put behind bars.
But the Justice Department neglected to report a commensurate rise in police brutality and other crimes committed by law enforcement officials and a racist legal system which is increasingly out of control. Last year Amnesty International issued a report on 'ill treatment, deaths in custody and unjustified shootings' by the New York City Police Department which showed that it routinely violates international human rights standards. Charges of police brutality more than doubled each year between 1987 and 1994, from 997 to 2,000, as did the number of deaths in police custody, from 11 to 24.
None of the cases of police brutality better personifies the human cost of 'the New York miracle' than the attack on a 30 year old Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima on 9 August. Police arrested Louima outside a Brooklyn nightclub, beating him repeatedly on the way to the police station. Once there a gang of cops pulled down his trousers, and, after dragging him in handcuffs, raped him with the handle of a toilet plunger so hard that it ripped his intestines and his bladder. They then shoved the handle down his throat so forcefully that it broke his teeth, spewing racial epithets and threats to kill his family the entire time. They threw him into a cell - only calling an ambulance after inmates insisted that he was bleeding heavily.
Louima's beating is not an aberration. It is a direct result of a policy instituted by Mayor Giuliani, known as the 'broken windows' approach to fighting crime. According to the theory, run down neighbourhoods with broken windows, graffiti, and other signs of 'disorder' are hotbeds of crime. The residents of these neighbourhoods should be targeted and arrested for minor offences to restore a sense of public safety. The result has been routine rounding up of 'criminals' who hop subway turnstiles (a robbery of $1.25) and the general harassment of residents of poor neighbourhoods. As early as 1994, in fact, an investigation conducted by the Mollen Commission found that many New York police 'are violent simply for the sake of violence'.
The report says, 'One officer from a Brooklyn North precinct told us how he and his colleagues once threw a bucket of ammonia in the face of an individual detained in a precinct holding pen.' When asked by interviewers, 'Did you beat people up who you arrested?' one cop replied, 'No. We'd just beat people up in general. If they're on the street, hanging around drug locations. It was a show of force...to show who was in charge.' The Mollen Commission also described how once, when raiding a brothel in uniform, police 'ordered the men to leave and the women to line up. The cops then picked their victims of choice and proceeded to terrorise and rape them without compunction.'
The Commission concluded that those civilians don't find justice by complaining to the police. It called the police department's Internal Affairs Division, which handles such cases, a 'do nothing agency' in which police investigators 'sit around and eat donuts and do crossword puzzles' to while away the hours. No wonder in New York only 4.5 percent of complaints of brutality are considered 'substantiated'. Only 1 percent of cops ever get disciplined.
Racism and brutality are rampant at every step of the criminal justice system. In April a decade old training film surfaced in Philadelphia, which shows prosecutors how to exclude blacks from juries. The narrator advises prosecutors that 'young black women are very bad' for juries, while 'the blacks from low income areas are less likely to convict. There's resentment for law enforcement. There's a resentment for authority. And as a result, you don't want those people on your jury.'
Meanwhile, the Southern Centre for Human Rights in Atlanta has documented dozens of death penalty cases in which lawyers were drunk during the trial, called their clients 'little nigger boy' or were so incompetent they were unable to recite a single statute or case. In the last year Texas courts have turned down three appeals from death row inmates whose lawyers fell asleep during their trials.
For example, as the Houston Chronicle described in the trial of George McFarland, who is now facing the death penalty, the defence attorney, John Benn, slept through much of the trial. When asked why he fell asleep, the lawyer responded, 'It's boring.' Nevertheless, Judge Doug Shaver of Texas District Court refused to grant McFarland a new trial, arguing, 'The Constitution says that everyone's entitled to an attorney of their choice. But the Constitution does not say that the lawyer has to be awake.'
Then in August the media released a videotape from a Texas prison that showed guards torturing prisoners during a cell by cell drug search in September 1996. The tape was made for 'training purposes' at Brazoria prison, a for profit prison run by Capital Corrections Resources Inc. The sheer scale of brutality can lead down only one path - mounting anger and an ultimate explosion. On 29 August tens of thousands of demonstrators blocked the Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan to protest at the beating of Abner Louima. But anger is building inside the walls of prisons as well. On 2 July, when 200 demonstrators staged a protest outside a Maryland prison during the execution of Flint Gregory Hunt, they were able to hear prisoners taking up the chant, 'They say death row. We say hell no!'