‘The Rivera/DC-37/social-spending axis, and the politicians in fluttering low orbit about it, don’t hesitate to race-bait Rudy Giuliani.’
FORMER Chief Justice of the New York Court of Appeals, Sol Wachtler, before he fell afoul of the law himself, once said that even a modestly competent district attorney can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
He was right.
And so it is that a DA of demonstrably modest competence presently will deliver four ham sandwiches to criminal court in The Bronx, reportedly to be charged with second-degree murder in the death of Amadou Diallo.
Persuading a Bronx grand jury to indict cops for any reason, let alone for murder, shouldn’t be a heavy lift. Certainly there’s no indication that DA Robert Johnson broke a sweat getting this piece of work done, even if it did take seven long weeks.
Time will tell whether the allegations – the most serious available to Johnson – are sustainable as a matter of fact, law and justice.
For the moment, though, it is fair to wonder why cop-killers like Anthony Richard Rivers (Officer Vincent Guidice) and Angel Diaz (Officer Kevin Gillespie) get the benefit of every doubt in Bob Johnson’s borough – while the DA doesn’t hesitate to train his heavy artillery on the NYPD.
One thing’s for sure: These indictments, as hugely overreaching as they appear to be, are going to add mass to the obnoxious campaign now under way to convince New Yorkers that they live in a racist police state.
This is a bald lie, even if 1,000 or so people – ranging from air-head actresses and posturing preachers to superannuated Stalinists and unctuously ambitious politicians – have gotten themselves arrested on its behalf.
But it is a purpose-told lie, integral to a sustained effort to destroy the first unambiguously successful New York City mayoralty in a generation.
And it has other purposes as well:
*It is meant to deflect blame, and shame, from the institutional, and individual, failures underlying most street crime in the city, and;
*It is intended to extract cheap personal revenge for slights, real or perceived, delivered by a mayor whose regard for other people’s sensibilities is famously underdeveloped – but whose commitment to this city is unequivocal.
Rudy Giuliani has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that the most effective way to deal with crime is to put criminals in jail and keep them there.
This strategy has made city streets safer than they have been in 35 years. It also has thoroughly discredited the notion that crime is better fought by social workers than by cops – and the implications of this for the city’s vast social-services industry are profound.
For Giuliani also holds the view that city-funded health-care programs should be about delivering health care – not about providing jobs for unionized health-care workers. He believes that welfare recipients should, whenever possible, work for their benefits – and that housing-on-demand and other no-questions-asked entitlement programs are immoral and, anyway, unaffordable.
He has translated these concepts into effective policy – fundamentally eroding the culture which sustains the municipal unionists and social-welfare “providers” who have been eating the public’s lunch for decades.
Why did Dennis Rivera, of the hospital-workers union, and the handful of DC-37 leaders who haven’t (yet) been caught ripping off their members, get themselves arrested last week?
Because Giuliani means to break their iron rice bowl. They’ll do anything to undercut his credibility – in hopes of derailing his agenda – even if it risks handing the city back to the thugs.
It is a fact of life that New York City’s police force is predominately white – and its street criminals are predominately black and Hispanic.
This is so for many reasons – some historical, and some rooted in the profoundly destructive nature of post-Great Society social policy.
Plus it is a useful tool for boosting racial tensions.
So why be surprised when the race card is turned to defend the status quo?
For sure, the Rivera/DC-37/social-spending axis, and the politicians in fluttering low orbit about it, don’t hesitate to race-bait Rudy Giuliani.
Among the latter are folks with eyes on Gracie Mansion (Freddy Ferrer, also of The Bronx, and the invincibly ambitious Mark Green); those who have been humiliated by the mayor (Ruth Messinger and David Dinkins, for starters); aging power-brokers seeking to protect corrupt enterprises (Charles Rangel); power-broker wannabees who just can’t seem to get things together (Calvin Butts) and fiercely partisan pols (New York’s highest-ranking black elected official, state Comptroller H. Carl McCall) who can’t mask their need to destroy Giuliani’s mayoralty, and his future – simply because he is a Republican.
For them, Diallo’s death is more than a tragedy – it’s sweet serendipity.
Each has submitted to arrest in the Diallo demonstrations (except Green and Butts, who march to their own drummers) – and in so doing each has endorsed this basic premise: that Giuliani runs a racist police department.
How so?
The NYPD, it is said, pays inappropriately close attention to young black and Hispanic men – particularly those who dress in certain provocative styles.
Well, the fact is that New York’s street criminals largely are drawn from this class. (Or were; most of the real hard-cases are in prison now, which is why crime has dropped so dramatically.)
This is a painful, yet objectively irrefutable, fact. And the blame for it resides not with the NYPD, but with the criminals themselves – and with the social pathologies and practices that produced them in the first place.
Bob Johnson chooses not to acknowledge this, and so his ham sandwiches now must pay a heavy price.
So will the city, eventually, if the demonstrations achieve their real purpose.
