THE POLICE MISCONDUCT WE NEVER SEE

By now everyone who follows the news knows that four New York police
officers gunned down Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant who was
unarmed, in the Bronx last week. They also know the name of Abner Louima,
who was tortured in a Brooklyn police precinct last year. And they may
remember the killing of Anthony Baez by an officer who took umbrage when a
football struck his car. All three cases have angered people in the
neighborhoods where they took place and have sparked public protests.

Of course, most claims of police misconduct never make headlines. But the
reality is that accusations against the police for more routine misconduct
- -- excessive force, illegal arrests and the like -- have risen sharply in
New York in the past four years, much more so than other claims against the
city. Consider these figures, released by the City Comptroller's office
last summer:

>From July 1993 to June 1997 (figures are in fiscal years), new claims of
police misconduct rose by 45 percent. From July 1997 to June 1998, 2,266
such claims were filed. Five years earlier (July 1993-June 1994), only
1,567 such claims had been filed.

Between fiscal years 1993 and 1997, payments by the city in police
misconduct cases rose 38 percent. In fiscal year 1997, it paid more than
$27.5 million for such claims, compared with about $20 million in 1993.

Typical of these claims are two cases I am familiar with because I
represent the complainants in their suits against the city.

A Latino real estate agent said he and his client were jumped and roughed
up last October by three plainclothes officers in East Harlem, allegedly
because the officers were responding to a call of a man with a gun and
thought the client's umbrella might be a gun. The real estate agent claims
the officers did not present any identification, and when pressed to do so,
one of them wrote down a phony name, badge number and precinct number.
Neither the agent nor his client were arrested.

The real estate agent, who had moved here from Hawaii two months earlier,
naively reported the incident to the Police Department's Internal Affairs
Bureau. The bureau could have traced the officers' identities from duty
rosters, the 911 call and dispatcher records within hours. Yet the bureau
merely "referred" the case to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which
must wait months for the same information that Internal Affairs can command
overnight.

There is also the case of a television sports producer who was arrested and
hauled off in handcuffs to a midtown police station for allegedly throwing
a container of coffee on the car of an off-duty police officer. The
producer maintained that he was merely asking the officer to stop tossing
garbage from his car onto the street. He also complained that the officer
was cursing in the station house after the arrest about how the officer,
rather than the neighborhood residents, "owned" the streets.

A Civilian Complaint Review Board investigator found a witness who
supported the producer's account of what happened in the station house, and
the board substantiated charges against the officer for abuse of authority
and discourtesy. That was two months after a Criminal Court judge had
dismissed the disorderly conduct charge the officer had filed against the
producer. The producer is still waiting for the Police Department to take
action. But the department fails to take any action in nearly two-thirds of
the cases substantiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and in the
remaining one-third the penalties are extremely minor.

Both the real estate agent and the producer say it will be a long time
before they can forget the indignities they endured. If the Police
Department does not follow up on complaints of misconduct -- and if it does
not insist that officers report such incidents rather than look the other
way to promote a "blue wall of silence" -- we will see a continued rise in
complaints.

Joel Berger, a lawyer in private practice, was a senior litigator for the
City Office of Corporation Counsel, where he monitored police misconduct
cases from 1988 to 1996.