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.
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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