Word: louima
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Colbert incident was neither as dramatic nor as horrendous as the recent brutalization of Abner Louima at the hands of New York City police. Cases like that grab national headlines, but they are aberrations. More systemic and infinitely harder to root out is a more common form of corruption: too many cops in too many places who routinely flout the laws they are sworn to uphold, cops who come to view the law itself as a maze of misguided rules that hinder their ability to "get the job done...
Fortunately, however, the election has retained a modicum of intrigue thanks to its status as a testing ground for a developing liberal response to Republican governance. It all began in late summer, when a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was brutalized by New York City police officers. The officers attacked him savagely, first beating him and then sodomizing him with a toilet plunger. During the incident, one of the officers allegedly remarked, "It's Giuliani time,"suggesting that the Mayor had embraced a laissez faire attitude toward police brutality. Finally, the embattled New York liberals had their issue...
Regardless of the fact that the Mayor explicitly condemned the action and launched a full investigation into it, his opponents succeeded in portraying the Louima case as evidence of a dark, unseemly element in Giuliani's New York. Al Sharpton and Messinger, then the Mayor's two principle Democratic opponents, attacked Giuliani for his anti-crime zeal, framing the issue of "law and order" as a battle between crime prevention and the safety of the underprivileged--a battle in which the Mayor was on the wrong side. According to them, the fact of the Louima case somehow counterbalanced...
...since then, the Mayor's opponents have done far more than simply insist on an indefensible moral equivalence between a 60 percent decline in violent crime and the brutalization of a single man. In the aftermath of the Louima incident, the liberal camp has devised a more comprehensive "spin" on New York's renewal in general, one with far wider potential application. The liberals now attack New York's unprecedented success in fighting crime by arguing that crime prevention is for the white and wealthy. They frame the situation as follows: the police protect the privileged and beat the poor...
Midway through the movie "L.A. Confidential," the three central characters recognize that they have lost their way as police officers. Predictably, the magic of the movies affords them opportunity at salvation. Life is less forgiving. The two cops charged with the assault of Abner Louima have perpetrated an act of evil and will justly go to jail. What few people know is that just one week prior to the assault, the same two police officers heroically re-entered a collapsing building in order to save its inhabitants, despite orders to withdraw from the scene because their own lives were...