MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Living ‘Black’ in the United States of America

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And living to tell the tales.

Traffic was heavy on Route 17 in Hasbrouck Heights on my way home to Ridgewood, NJ, after work on Wednesday, which wasn’t exactly news. But, as I approached a stretch where Route 46 and Interstate 80 go over Route 17, traffic eased and I saw the reason why. Rubbernecking motorists.

What were they looking at?

A black man with both hands on top of his head standing in front of a white police officer on the grassy area next to the shoulder. The cop’s car, lights flashing, and another car in front of it were parked on the shoulder. Unlike Alton Sterling on Tuesday or Philando Castile on Wednesday, this black man stopped by a white cop was still alive.

James Eagan Holmes, heavily armed, killed 12 and injured 70 people in a Colorado theater and was captured alive. Dylann Roof killed nine churchgoers in South Carolina and was captured alive. Jason Dalton killed six and injured two in Kalamazoo. His life was preserved as he was being arrested.

Cedric Chatman. Tamir Rice. Laquan McDonald. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Black men make up 6% of U.S. population; are 40% of people killed by police.

He’s lucky to be alive, I thought as I drove on. Was that too sanguine a response to the situation?

Jesse Williams Speaking out

I am not taking the situation lightly. I’ve lived long enough to be a middle-aged black male despite too many tangles with cops, both in the United States of America and elsewhere, to do that. But, as these killings pile up, becoming more and more common each day, I’ve long realized that I’ve been lucky to still be alive to tell tales of encounters with cops.

My narrow escape from racist Afrikaners in 1994, while on assignment for the New York Daily News in South Africa, is an entirely different story that will be told a different day. Not today. Also, it’s available on the Internet for anyone curious enough to want to find out.

St. Louis, MO in the ’80’s

A police car pulled up behind my car as I eased into traffic after a college friend and I left a bar late one night many years ago. He pulled me over. The cop came up to the car, peered in, then instructed me to step out. I did. He said that he had stopped me for suspected drunk driving because he had observed me weaving in and out of traffic. I protested that I did no such thing and that, in any case, I couldn’t be drunk driving since I had not been drinking.

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July 9, 2016
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NEW CHALLENGES FOR A NEW NATION: Sharpton Sees Lesson in South Africa Voting

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, May 1, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—After a whirlwind, emotional visit, the Rev. Al Sharpton flew home to New York yesterday with stars in his eyes.

“If only I could bring home in a bottle the hope and spirit I saw here, it would change New York politics forever,” said Sharpton, who’s challenging incumbent Daniel Moynihan for the U.S. Senate democratic nomination.

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April 14, 2009
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The last rally

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I voted at 8:37 a.m. today in Ridgewood, N.J. I did not have any problem whatsoever. Meanwhile, the video above was Sen. Barack Obama addressing more than 60,000 supporters in the last rally before today’s voting.

Update: A friend sent me e-mail saying “I got out early and voted. I was there almost and hour early and when they opened the doors there were several hundred people in line.”

Another friend, Jim Sleeper, wrote about his experience here: “Polling places in New York City open at 6:00 am, and when I arrived at mine at 5:45 a.m. at least 600 people were on line, stretching from the school door near East 33rd Street and Third Avenue back to the end of the block on Second Avenue, and then down the avenue to 32nd Street. By the time I left after casting my vote, at 6:45 or so, it had grown light out, and there were at least another 600 people waiting on line.”

Continue . . .

November 4, 2008
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A wanderer arrives

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When I was a young newspaper reporter (a nerdy one, at that) at The Record in Hackensack, N.J., one of the journalists I looked up to was Michael Powell. Mr. Powell was then at New York Newsday but he had passed through The Record in what was becoming an itinerant career, with stops at Newsday, the Washington Post and now The New York Times.

When some of us would get discouraged about something in journalism, we would reach for some of Mr. Powell’s old stories, particularly his profile of Frank E. Rogers, the long-serving mayor of Harrison, N.J. His stories in The Record and Newsday gave us hope. He was the writer we aspired to be when we grew up as reporters.

I recount this to say that Michael Powell is a phenomenal reporter and a great writer.

I don’t know whether Mr. Powell aspired to a career at The Times (as most of us did) but we heard that he turned down The Times to go to the Washington Post when New York Newsday imploded. Some writers have been known to spurn the stultifying culture of The Times, some of them preferring the Post (Washington) and the Los Angeles Times.

In any case, Mr. Powell is at The Times now and The Times that he comes to, though still a colossus, is somewhat tarnished, prone to getting in its own way. And the Mr. Powell that I now read in that newspaper seems different. His work here, especially covering the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic Party nomination and for the presidency of the United States, has bothered me at times.

Which is a long way to come around to what I want to say, which is that I enjoyed immensely Mr. Powell’s “American Wanderer . . . “ piece in Sunday’s “This Week In Review” section. The piece is well researched and well written. In fact, it may be over-written, especially the opening section:

That an air of the enigmatic attends Barack Obama is a commonplace; he is a man of fractured geography and family and wanderings.

He came of age in far corners, Indonesia and Hawaii, went to schools on both coasts and landed in Chicago, where he had no blood tie. With talent and ambition, he has leapt for the presidency at a tender age and will go to Denver to claim his Democratic nomination for the office.

There is to Mr. Obama’s story a Steinbeck quality, like so many migratory American tales: the mother who flickers in and out; the absent and iconic father; the grandfather, raised in the roughneck Kansas oil town of El Dorado, who moves the family restlessly, ceaselessly westward.

The American DNA encodes wanderlust ambition, and a romance clings to Mr. Obama’s story. The roamer who would make himself and his land anew is a familiar archetype.

And yet to describe such a man as rootless, as some people do, can stir up more questions, and an ambivalence reflected in the answers. What is rootlessness anyway? The word connotes something both celebrated and feared. Early on in Mr. Obama’s time in Chicago, the Democratic machine types would ask of this preternaturally calm young pol: Who sent him?

That question, probing and suspicious, has tendrils extending deep into our history. Again and again in American culture, the rootless outsider becomes an insider, and begins to guard his prize.

First he has to find that prize. For four centuries hope and despair pushed immigrants to these shores. Royalist Cavaliers found in the Virginias a new hierarchy. Puritans spread insistently across not always fruitful lands of New England. The Highlands English and Scots no sooner landed in Philadelphia in the 18th century than they lit out for the hills of Pennsylvania and down the mountain ridges of the Appalachians. In their sackcloth and baggy trousers, they were unceremonious and warlike wanderers.

“When I get ready to move, I just shut the door, call the dogs and get started,” is a Highlands saying transposed to a new world. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 in his influential “Frontier Thesis” that the key to American vitality could be found in this relentless, drifting movement.

My only quibble with this section is that what Mr. Powell claims as a uniquely American trait is actually a universal one. It transcends every culture. It is the linchpin of every fairy tale, adventure, or fantasy, from “Beowulf” to “Harry Potter” and everything in between.

Every society fears-lionizes the stranger who by dint of talent, vision, unique strength, or magical power overcomes to lead.

After this immensely enjoyable, yet strained, opening, the piece settles down and reaches some surprising conclusions:

Of the two nominees, Sen. John McCain has been the more peripatetic figure, with Obama the more rooted one. Obama is the one who sought out community and has stayed in one place for two decades. He is the one who is not divorced and has raised a family with his wife while Mr. McCain abandoned one family to marry a much younger and wealthier woman.

I hope Mr. Powell stays and that his career flourishes at The Times. I want him to take everything that is good about the place without being infected by its many maladies.

August 25, 2008
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Living and dying on these Jersey streets

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IRVINGTON, N.J. — Dolores Timmons watched as the woman who lived across the street paced the sidewalk for a good half hour under a scorching August heat, back and forth across the length of her front yard as if encased by invisible walls. They lived in similar brick and wood-frame homes here on a busy working-class block of 18th Avenue off the Garden State Parkway, but they had never spoken.

Another neighbor told Mrs. Timmons that the woman, Shalga Hightower, was mourning her 20-year-old daughter, one of three college students who had been shot dead in a Newark schoolyard a few days earlier. Mrs. Timmons walked across the street to introduce herself and offer condolences, bringing her grandson, Gary Farrar Jr., who was just a year older and also in college, studying graphic design at Rutgers.
Soon the two women struck up a neighborly acquaintanceship, making small talk when they ran into each other or waving from their stoops.
Mrs. Timmons, 64, had lived on the block for 24 years, and she occupied the first floor of her two-family house; upstairs were Gary and his parents, Gary Sr., a landscaper, and Betty Farrar, a nurse. Ms. Hightower, 47, a home-health aide supervisor, moved there last June with her three children; Iofemi, the oldest, was about to enter Delaware State University when she was killed.

Iofemi Hightower and Gary Farrar Jr., lived on the same street. Hightower was to enroll in Delaware State – oldest of three children.Shot and killed August, 2007 by strangers while chilling in a schoolyard with friends. Farrar, an only child, graduated from Rutgers. Shot and killed April 20, 2008 – in a driveby on his street (by a stranger) while walking friends to their car.

As the months passed, Mrs. Timmons noticed how Ms. Hightower would often wear a memorial T-shirt stamped with her daughter’s picture.
“When Iofemi died, I remember thinking how fortunate I was that my grandson was in college, away from these crazy streets out here,” Mrs. Timmons said on Monday. “But then he graduated and came back home and now he’s dead, too.”

For the families who live on this hilly stretch of 18th Avenue between Grove Street and Eastern Parkway, where Irvington juts into Newark, Ms. Hightower’s killing last summer — six suspects have been arrested — brought the violence that surrounds them frighteningly close. Losing Mr. Farrar barely nine months later —just four months after he had graduated from Rutgers and returned home — was something beyond.

* * *

“We made our sacrifices and just raised our son the best way that we could,” Mr. Farrar said on Monday.

Iofemi Hightower worked for Continental Airlines in Newark and planned to study business at Delaware State. Mr. Farrar had a degree in graphic design from Rutgers and was a waiter in Montclair as he pursued a job in his field. They were, by all accounts, exceptions — “good kids who stayed out of trouble and had hopes and dreams for the future,” as Mrs. Timmons put it.

Mr. Farrar, she said, recently bought a navy three-button suit to wear on job interviews. Now, she said, his parents plan to bury him in it.

Read The New York Times for the rest of this heartbreaking story

April 22, 2008
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Barack Obama

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In his own words at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, N.J.:

“ I have always been convinced that change in America does not happen from the top down. Change happens from the bottom up. So I believed that if we could get the voices of the American people to join together, people from all walks of life: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, North, South, East, West, rich, poor, young and old, we could gather our voices to challenge the special interests that have come to dominate Washington. But also challenge ourselves to be better. There was no problem we could not solve, there was no destiny we could not fulfill.

And I am here to report to you, New Jersey, that after a year of crisscrossing the country, after engaging in a conversation with the American people, my bet has paid off and my faith has been vindicated because the American people, they are ready to rise and create a new America. They are ready to turn the page and write a new chapter in the American story. I know this because I’ve been in a conversation with the American people and they are desperate for change, because the stories they tell me are all too often stories of hardship and stories of struggle.”

February 5, 2008
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U.S. Serbs Saddened and Angry By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, April 04, 1999

Lana Todorovich was on the phone to Belgrade with an urgent message for her parents: “Get out. Now.”

In the early hours of March 24, U.S. NATO warplanes bearing bombs were on their way to Yugoslavia.

Milan and Yela Simic, 62 and 57 years old, heeded their daughter’s warning. They made the hair-raising journey through the city of Novi Sad, northwest of Belgrade, as the first bombs began to fall.

“They saw bombs and rockets fall on Novi Sad, everywhere just fire and destruction and fear and disbelief,” said Todorovich, a fashion executive from Westchester.

They traveled first to Budapest under cover of darkness, then took a flight on CFA Czech Airlines to The Hague, Netherlands. The paradox of this war and their flight from it: The United States was their ultimate haven from the fighting.

“So the very country that was bombing them,” Todorovich said, “was also their way out of this terrible situation.”

That ambiguous dynamic in which the pain of U.S. attacks was felt along with the comfort of sanctuary in America has played out with many Serb immigrants in the last two weeks.

They love America, they say, but they hate what American-led NATO forces are doing to them.

More than 2 million Serb immigrants live in the U.S., predominantly in Midwestern cities, such as Chicago and Cleveland. In the greater New York area, some 50,000 Serbs live in Paterson and Elizabeth, N.J., and in Astoria, Queens.

Many express disbelief at what they see as the unfairness and injustice of the NATO attack on their homeland. Todorovich, 33 and the mother of a 6-year-old girl, arrived in the U.S. about 10 years ago and is an American citizen. She said the bombing campaign left her disillusioned, frustrated and angry.

“I just believed that we would do the right thing, and we didn’t.” she said. “It is a violation of my American sense of morality, to go ahead and commit aggression, provoke death and atrocities in the name of protecting people from the very same thing,”

Todorovich is not alone in feeling betrayed by U.S. actions in the Balkans. Serbs interviewed in the city said they blame President Clinton, not the American people, who they do not believe support the assault on their nation.

They scoff, however, at the notion that the U.S. quarrel is with Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, not with the Serb people. In protests across the city and all over the world, Serbs have taken to wearing bull’s-eyes on their shirt fronts and backs, suggesting they are also targets of the bombs.

George Bogdanich, 50, of the upper East Side, decried what he sees as President Clinton’s bungling of the conflict.

“These obnoxious references to Hitler and Nazis and so on Clinton ought to be aware that Serbs provided the first resistance to Hitler on the mainland of Europe during World War II,” Bogdanich said.

Americans just don’t understand what is at stake in Kosovo, he said. For Serbs to give in to the Kosovo Liberation Army, many said, is tantamount to a violent separatist movement wanting to secede from Texas and Russia or China saying, “Give them what they want or we’ll bomb you.”

“It’s just a sad situation,” Bogdanich said. “But Clinton does nothing but create ill will and bad policies by demonizing Serbs.”

By bombing and threatening Serb sovereignty, he said, Clinton and NATO did for Milosevic what the Serb strongman had not been able to do for himself: wipe out opposition to him in his own country.

Bogdanich bristled at reports of fresh Serb atrocities against Kosovo Albanians since the NATO bombing began. He insisted there is no evidence of such incidents.

Like many other Serbs, he blamed the reports on a biased Western media that have taken complex issues and created a simplified picture of good and evil.

“As a result of the selective press coverage, Serbs have been demonized,” Bogdanich said.

The media, Serbian-Americans argued, tagged the Serb people as genocidal for the killing of 200,000 Bosnian Muslims. But they fail to report that many Serbs have suffered ethnic cleansing at the hands of other warring Balkan ethnic groups, they said. They cited, correctly, the 190,000 Croatian Serbs routed from their homes in 1995 by Croat soldiers being advised by retired U.S. generals under the cover of NATO air strikes.

Mark Milich, 46, a third-generation Serbian-American who lives in Port Washington, L.I., said Clinton’s arrogance was responsible for a debacle.

“Our action is not the way to free people from oppression. America, the land of the free, is now responsible for driving these people deeper into their oppression,” Milich said.

“These are the days of infamy,” said Tatjana, 32, of Bernardsville, N.J., an economist for a telecommunications company who did not want her full name used. “I just don’t believe Tomahawks [cruise missiles] can bring peace.”

Todorovich’s parents are happy to be alive. But their worldly possessions have been reduced to the two suitcases they hurriedly packed when they left Belgrade.

“My parents are just recuperating now,” she said, “trying to get over the fear, the treacherous ride through bombs, through the furnace.”

GRAPHIC: CLARENCE DAVIS DAILY NEWS RALLY: Pro-Serb protesters sporting bull’s-eye look popular in Yugoslavia march outside Grand Central Terminal last week.

April 4, 1999
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A MALEVOLENT HULK Sunken ship continues to claim lives By MICHAEL O. ALLEN

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

nullWednesday, August 26, 1998

NEW YORK–On a foggy July night in 1956, 52 people died when the cruise ship Stockholm rammed the luxury liner Andrea Doria off Nantucket Island.

But 42 years later, even as the Andrea Doria lies a rusting hulk 240 feet under the Atlantic Ocean, its appetite for blood has not been quelled.

From 1981 through last year, seven divers had lost their lives in search of sport or riches rumored to be beneath the ship’s collapsed deck. Since June 28, three more have died in the dark and deep waters of the North Atlantic.

For divers, the Andrea Doria holds an almost mystical allure.

But it is sinking deeper into the seabed, and its insides are rotted out, with webs of cables everywhere that often snare divers. They risk being blinded by silt stirred by their own motions. And the ocean itself is subject to capricious changes.

Craig Sicola of Surf City, N.J., died June 28 after suffering decompression illness while exploring the wreck.

The body of Richard Roost was discovered July 9, floating face-down in the mud inside the ship’s first-class bar and lounge area. Like Sicola, Roost, 46, of Ann Arbor, Mich., was an experienced diver.

Vincent Napoliello, a 32-year-old stockbroker who lived in Brooklyn, was the latest of Andrea Doria’s victims.

Napoliello was a careful man, those who knew him said. He came home to his apartment one day to find his fiance, Marisa Gengaro, sitting on the sofa wearing a helmet.

“Marisa, what are you doing?” the puzzled Napoliello asked.

“Well, Vincent, accidents do happen in the home, you know,” Gengaro jokingly replied.

“I was making fun of him because he was just so careful about everything,” she said.

By all accounts, Napoliello took that care to his sport, where he was recognized not only as a top-notch diver, but also as a conservative, well-prepared wreck explorer.

William Cleary, a 37-year-old lawyer from Hackensack, N.J., who had been Napoliello’s dive partner for several years, said Napoliello always told everyone not to take foolish chances.

Napoliello’s message was simple: If you run into trouble, leave. You can always go back.

“Vincent had been there for me inside shipwrecks, on a few occasions saving my life,” Cleary said, “including on the day that he died–on the dive prior. He freed me from an entanglement.”

Built at a cost of $ 30 million shortly after World War II and called the Grand Dame of the Sea, the 700-foot, 11-story Andrea Doria was a virtual floating museum of murals, rare wooden panels, and ceramics and mirrors commissioned by its owner, the Italian Line.

Designed with 22 watertight compartments, it was advertised as unsinkable.

It was en route to New York City on the night of July 25, 1956, from Genoa, Italy, with more than 1,600 people aboard when it was broadsided by the smaller Stockholm, whose 750 passengers and crew were bound for Sweden.

It took the Andrea Doria 11 hours to sink, plenty of time for valuables to be removed. But that has not stopped rumors of treasures being locked in her compartments or strewn on the ocean floor.

And a purser’s safe, where passengers kept jewelry and other valuables, is one of 16 still believed to be in the wreck 46 miles off Nantucket.

The most famous explorer of the Andrea Doria was department store heir Peter Gimbel.

In 1981, Gimbel brought up a Bank of Italy safe from the wreck. It contained only soggy paper currency.

His quest for the safe nearly killed Gimbel. He was brought up unconscious, suffering from oxygen poisoning, on his first dive that year. Afterward, he declared that the wreck had a “malevolent spirit.”

The ship’s reputation doesn’t deter several hundred technical divers–those trained to go below 130 feet–from exploring the wreck each summer. About a dozen charter vessels ferry divers from late June to early August.

Napoliello was one of them.

On his first trip of the season, in late June, he and other divers discovered a china closet full of cups, saucers, bowls and pitchers, all bearing the Italian Line logo in gold leaf.

Napoliello returned a week later, on the Fourth of July weekend, and salvaged more artifacts.

On Aug.3, Napoliello was among 12 passengers and three crew members aboard The Seeker, the most active of the Andrea Doria dive vessels, as it departed Montauk Harbor on Long Island.

Anticipating success on this last trip of the season, Napoliello brought cigars and Scotch. The boat reached the site about 8 a.m. the next day, and about an hour later, Napoliello and Cleary made their first dive.

Later in the day, Napoliello dove without Cleary, who was exploring another deck on the ship. Instead, he went down with a man making his first trip to the Doria.

Cleary said Napoliello went into the foyer deck through an opening known as Gimbel’s Hole, down to a depth of about 210 feet, then swam toward the back of the ship to the china closet.

According to Cleary, Napoliello had been breathing the necessary pressurized gas mixtures out of just one side of his double tanks, instead of both. A valve that regulated breathing from both sides somehow had shut off, Cleary said.

So Napoliello thought he was running out of air. He motioned to his partner that he was going up, Cleary said. But instead of using the anchor line on which the Seeker was moored to the wreck, Napoliello swam toward the anchor line for another dive boat, the Sea Inn, a move that has puzzled his colleagues, because Napoliello had not made other mistakes that disoriented or panicked divers make.

At that point, Napoliello had been in the ship for about 17 minutes. Instead of ascending slowly, taking about an hour and breathing gas mixtures with more oxygen to expel the helium and nitrogen from his system, he surfaced in three minutes.

Cleary said Napoliello must have passed out outside the hull of the Andrea Doria, and his lungs ruptured as he floated to the surface.

He had no vital signs when he was pulled aboard the Sea Inn. The Coast Guard was called and helicoptered him to Cape Cod Hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival.

Medical examiners are still waiting for results of tests to determine what killed him.

Cleary said it would be an insult to Napoliello for him to stop diving.

“I could picture him saying, ‘I’m dead now, and you are not going to do this anymore?”‘

August 26, 1998
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KIDS ON PARADE; Get jump on grownups

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, August 31, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, TARA GEORGE and DON SINGLETON, Daily News Staff Writers

Eastern Parkway boomed with Caribbean music and bloomed with bouquets of colorful feathers and flowers yesterday in a warmup for tomorrow’s 30th West Indian American Day Carnival Parade.

It was Children’s Day, and thousands of youngsters paraded up the broad thoroughfare in costumes that were smaller versions of the ones their parents, uncles and aunts will be wearing tomorrow. Everywhere you looked, folks were dancing to reggae and calypso and soca beats.

“The adults are going to have their parade Monday, but today’s our day,” said Dennis White, 18, who was dancing with a group of relatives at Eastern Parkway and Kingston Ave. “It’s a chance for us to show pride in our West Indian culture.”

Andrew McKenzie, 38, of Jackson, N.J., was standing with his daughters, Melissa, 5, and Kimberly, 6, who were dressed as queens of Sheba with gold crowns and lots of gold glitter.

As Melissa’s mom encouraged her to dance, her dad beamed with pride and moved to the beat of the music. “This is my culture,” he said. “I did this myself, and I want my kids to enjoy it, too.”

Iwojima Lewis, 49, was there with his 7-year-old twin daughters, Vanessa and Denise. Vanessa was having a ball. “I love the costumes,” her mom said, “and I love to see the children in a parade. It’s good to know where you come from and hear all the different music.”

More than 2 million people are expected to turn Eastern Parkway into a sea of color and calypso tomorrow in one of the city’s largest annual events.

“This is what we live for,” said performer Harriet James, 38, of Queens. “This is carnival!”

Months of planning and rehearsing will bear fruit as thousands of dancers in sequins and feathers sashay to the pulsating sounds of steel and brass bands.

The parade starts at 10 a.m. at the corner of Utica Ave. and Eastern Parkway. Floats will move west down the parkway to Grand Army Plaza, where they will turn onto Flatbush Ave. and proceed to the finish at Empire Blvd.

Original Story Date: 08/31/97

August 31, 1997
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Plungers Waved In Angry March

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, August 17, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, CAROLINA GONZALEZ and PAUL SCHWARTZMAN, Daily News Staff Writers

Brandishing toilet plungers and chanting “KKK must go!” thousands of angry protesters yesterday descended on Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct, where two cops have been charged with torturing a Haitian immigrant.

Pressed tightly against a line of cops standing behind police barricades, the mostly Haitian crowd jammed the street outside the Flatbush stationhouse where two cops, Justin Volpe and Charles Schwarz, allegedly beat Abner Louima before shoving a toilet plunger into his rectum last week.

Louima watched the demonstration from the intensive care unit at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where he is recovering.

Louima “felt very good that people are upset about what happened and that they were making their voices heard,” his lawyer Carl Thomas said.

As temperatures steamed into the mid-90s, the raucous crowd swelled to 4,000, with many pounding drums, dancing, and hoisting Haitian flags and plungers in the air in a racially charged, sometimes carnival-like scene.

Despite scattered skirmishes, no one was arrested in the tense stand-off as police brass took pains to adopt a conciliatory tone, even as many in the crowd chanted, “Pig,” “Shame on you,” and, “Seven-O, KKK.”

Someone from the crowd lobbed an empty water bottle, hitting a police officer in the eye. The officer was not hurt, but as a precaution, six officers were stationed on the rooftop of a one-story building across the street from the stationhouse.

The bottle throwing occurred around 7 p.m. after a late afternoon storm reduced the crowd to about 75.

During the height of the protest, marchers also shouted racial epithets and taunted the officers by waving the plungers in their faces.

“It’s Giuliani Time,” read one demonstrator’s sign, a reference to Louima’s claim that the cops told him, “This is Giuliani time, not Dinkins time” as they beat him.

Another sign displayed a photograph of Volpe with horns protruding from his head, accompanied by a caption that read, “Devil in a Blue Suit.”

Assistant Police Chief Patrick Brennan said the demonstrators “are mad as hell, and they have the right to be.”

“They want to get the most out of their demonstration, and who can blame them?” he asked.

Deputy Police Chief Wilbur Chapman conceded that the torture incident has “fractured” the community’s fragile relationship with the police. But he said the precinct’s new commander, Inspector Raymond Diaz, would “work hard to restore the faith.”

“One particularly horrific incident doesn’t negate all the terrific work that has been done,” Chapman said.

But that was not a sentiment held by many in the crowd, which began gathering in the morning outside Club Rendez-Vous, the Flatbush nightclub where Louima’s fracas with cops began early Aug. 9.

“In Haiti we went through all these things,” said Marie Toussaint, 36. “It’s a shock to find the same thing going on in the United States.”

Roy Sargent, 55, a former Flatbush resident, said he drove to the march from his home in Piscataway, N.J., because he wanted to be counted among the voices expressing outrage.

“We put the Police Department in uniform to serve and protect us, and this is what they’re going to do us?” he asked incredulously. “This has to stop.”

Others vowed to protest in front of the stationhouse every day.

The Rev. Al Sharpton spoke to the smaller crowd assembled at the precinct stationhouse.

“We’re not against the police; we’re against police brutality,” Sharpton told the demonstrators.

Standing nearby, Jonas Louima, 25, Abner Louima’s brother, said he hoped that the restless crowds would remain peaceful.

“I don’t want fights,” he said. “I want people to express what they feel without violence.”

Louima’s friend, Ian Joseph, said the steps taken by Police Commissioner Howard Safir to punish cops in the precinct did not send a strong enough message that brutality is unacceptable.

“They shift one and the other, but before they start firing people it won’t change,” he said. “If the cops had to live among us, they might fear that we might see them the next day, and it would be very different.”

Original Story Date: 08/17/97

August 17, 1997
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