A BEATING IN BROOKLYN

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

On Saturday, Aug. 9, Abner Louima, 30, a Haitian immigrant, was relaxing at a Brooklyn music club when a fight broke out between two women. Next thing Louima knew, he had been taken into custody by police outside the club. Louima, a bank security guard and a married father, says he was beaten as police drove to Brooklyn's 70th Precinct station house. But it was after he got there that the real nightmare began: as he tells it, he was strip-searched, then two cops took him into a bathroom and shoved a wooden pole, perhaps belonging to a toilet plunger, into his rectum. (Once Louima was hospitalized--after 1 1/2 hours at the station house--doctors found he had a ripped bladder and a punctured lower intestine.) Louima says the officers then forced the stick into his mouth, breaking his front teeth. As all this took place, Louima claims, police taunted him, saying, "That's your s__, nigger," and "We're going to teach niggers to respect police officers," and "This is Giuliani time, not Dinkins time."

David Dinkins was the first black mayor of New York City (1990-94); Rudolph Giuliani, the current mayor, rode to office on a law-and-order, pro-police platform, and is expected to coast to re-election in large part because of a precipitous 54% drop in serious crime during his time in office. Suddenly, he was faced with the flip side--an apparently horrific instance of police brutality that punctuated three years of complaints by blacks and Hispanics that police abusiveness was out of control. It was not the kind of endorsement Giuliani, usually outspoken in his support of police, needed or wanted in an election year. And he was swift to describe the incident as repulsive and demand that justice be served.

The charges against Louima were quickly dropped, but the case against the police officers who allegedly tortured him has just begun. One officer, 25-year-old Justin Volpe, was arrested and charged with aggravated sexual abuse and first-degree sexual assault; another, 31-year-old Charles Schwarz, was indicted; and 12 other officers from the 70th Precinct were either transferred, suspended or demoted to desk duty. Both the Brooklyn district attorney's office and the U.S. Attorney's office are investigating the incident, and more arrests are expected. New York City police commissioner Howard Safir called it a "horrific crime" and pointed out that it was a police officer who was present who came forward to implicate his colleagues. Safir told TIME, "We are going to make sure the perpetrators...go to jail." Giuliani's critics say the mayor's concern is too little, too late. Civil claims paid by the city to those who sue charging police brutality have risen from $13.5 million in 1992 to $32 million last year, and 90% of all police-brutality cases in New York are filed by nonwhites. Safir says civilian complaints about police in New York were actually down 20% in the first half of this year, but critics say that's because the Civilian Complaint Review Board is ineffectual; it has received more than 20,000 complaints over the past four years, but only one officer has been dismissed from the force as a result.

Clearly there's a gap in racial understanding that needs to be bridged. A 1996 Amnesty International report said that New York's populace is 57% nonwhite, but the police force is 72% white. Even some cops are fed up. "For years the police department has allowed crime to concentrate and flourish in certain areas, and overnight that has changed," says Anthony Miranda, head of the Latino Officers Association. "We now have aggressive enforcement without any understanding of neighborhoods or history. We have gone from a tolerance of crime in certain areas to zero tolerance without any concern for how the neighborhoods might react. As a result, there are more serious incidents and an escalation of police aggressiveness that leads to what local areas see as harassment and escalates into brutality."

In such a situation, says Joseph McNamara, the retired police chief of San Jose, Calif., who was once a New York City police officer, "cops lose it because their authority and sense of order get challenged. They are told they are soldiers in a war. Well, in a war you get atrocities, and that's what this case appears to be."

For his part, Marvyn Kornberg, the attorney for Officer Volpe, simply says Louima was lying, not about his injuries but about how and where they occurred. "What happened to [Louima] was not a result of anything that took place in the station house," he declared, without elaboration. And he disputed any allegation of racial bias. "They don't know what they're talking about--Volpe's girlfriend is black."

Last weekend Louima was in stable condition in a New York hospital. He told a reporter for the Associated Press, "I thank God I'm still alive, and I want justice."

--Reported by Lisa McLaughlin and Elaine Rivera/New York

With reporting by LISA MCLAUGHLIN AND ELAINE RIVERA/NEW YORK