around issues of race — had a strong Northern component targeting white working class “ethnics.” But I only realized writing my book that I was raised in the capital of the GOP’s Northern strategy.
You can argue with my geography. Macomb County, Michigan, right outside Detroit, is considered the ancestral home of the Reagan Democrats, thanks to Stan Greenberg’s pioneering polling on how voters there transitioned from backing John F. Kennedy in 1960 to Ronald Reagan in 1980, mainly around crime and race.
But while Macomb County gave us Eminem and Alice Cooper, my ancestral home, southwestern Long Island, gave us Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, the loudest, lingering voices of the white backlash that emerged in my childhood (The PBA’s Patrick Lynch, also Irish Catholic, grew up nearby in Bayside, Queens). That backlash had a lot to do with fearing crime and chaos, and reflexively defending cops, two issues that again polarized Americans around race in 2014 – even in liberal New York, and even in a time when the city, overall, is incomparably calmer and safer than it was decades ago.
I saw that polarization personally this year, on Facebook, where I’m in touch with family and childhood friends. Some of them are Long Island Republicans I love very much. We have an unspoken pact: we stick to commenting on one another’s kids and pets and leave politics alone. But recent headlines about police killings eroded that agreement, with a few people cautiously, respectfully, disagreeing with my posts. And even apolitical people — even a few Democrats — posted news stories defending police and attacking protesters, whether in Ferguson, Mo., or here in New York.
It reminded me of growing up, and the peculiar politics of southwestern Long Island in the 60s and 70s. It was more like Outer Queens: mainly working class migrants from Brooklyn and the Bronx who’d fled the city in the early 60s. It was about having a yard and a two-car garage and a bedroom for every kid; it was also about what’s euphemistically called white flight.
It wasn’t just race: the flight was driven by crime and arson and riots, and a sense that the world was unraveling. I tried to write about some of this sympathetically in my book: the transformation of New York in the 1960s and 70s was scary. Crime and arson rates spiked: the murder rate jumped 150 percent between 1965 and 1973; property crime jumped by a third. Some of my uncles and cousins were cops and firemen, including my mother’s two brothers. She worried about them every day, and so did I.
But for a whole lot of people, it was all about race. Conservatives made sure of that, with William F. Buckley running for mayor in 1965 mocking the liberal idea that social factors drove the rising crime rate – as if poverty and racism could “make Negro crime any less criminal.”
Significantly, that comment came in a debate over whether cops needed civilian review. Almost every major urban riot of the 1960s – Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967 – was touched off by police misconduct. When Mayor John Lindsay appointed a police review board, Pat Lynch’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association sponsored a ballot initiative to repeal it. To the shock of liberal Manhattan, a coalition of outer-borough Jews and “white ethnics” voted with the cops.
In 1977, Democrat Ed Koch shoved aside Mario Cuomo and Bella Abzug to become mayor, partly powered by the white backlash. But Republican Rudy Giuliani took backlash politics to a new level, without ambivalence. The epidemic of police violence against unarmed black men under Giuliani – the killings of Patrick Dorismund and Amadou Diallo; the sodomizing of Abner Louima with a broom handle at a Brooklyn precinct – proceeded with no apologies from the mayor. Dorismund was “no altar boy,” Giuliani insisted – though in fact the dead man had been an altar boy.Talk about using the holidays to flush bad news. Between the salacious internal Sony emails, the Obama administration’s watershed reset of U.S.-Cuban relations, and Christmas the average American will not get reporting on the fine print in the Senate Committee report nor a full analysis of the ambiguous CIA response.
In this case the devil really is in the details. For years the public was told the torture techniques saved lives, prevented additional terror attacks and helped lead to the capture of Osama bin Laden. Not so, says the Senate report, which goes on to chronicle years of obfuscation, deceit and deception by a CIA that was hell-bent on covering its tracks. Now the CIA is saying it is “unknowable” if the torture techniques produced results.
Even well into the Obama administration the Agency continued to go to the extraordinary steps of hacking into the Senate Committee’s computers. The Agency’s track record already includes the covert destruction in 2005 of 92 videos of detainee interrogations, which would have been critical to congressional investigators. In 2010 a federal special prosecutor declined to prosecute.
What emerges from the Senate report is a CIA that post-9/11 quickly turned to outside contractors and used multiple “black sites” where they employed what they euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” These practices included waterboarding, forced rectal feeding, extended sleep deprivation, keeping subjects in prolonged stress positions including standing on broken bones, closing detainees into coffin-like boxes, staging of mock executions, as well as making threats to kill or rape detainee family members.
Dozens of individuals were wrongfully detained by the CIA and two of the Agency’s informants were mistakenly tortured. One detainee died of hypothermia after 48 hours of sleep deprivation, getting doused with cold water and being chained to a concrete floor.
Certainly these are all activities that would be defined as illegal under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified in 1994. Under the terms of the Convention there are no “exceptional circumstances,” like preventing a potential terrorist act, which would permit the use of these techniques that deliberately inflict “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental.”
Excessive force by police, and rampant racism, was never acceptable, not even in the years of crime and chaos. But what stuns me now is: crime is way down. Arson is almost non-existent. There are no more riots. Most protests against police abuse are peaceful. Sure, there are a few saboteurs smashing windows and punching cops, but you’ll also see a whole lot of protesters trying to stop them – and it seems most of the violent folks are white.
With one critical exception: Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the mentally ill Brooklyn native who shot his ex-girlfriend (an Air Force reservist) in Baltimore, then shot Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.
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