Mayor Giuliani yesterday blasted a federal civil-rights panel that accuses the NYPD of racial profiling, insisting its report “bears no relation to reality.”
But the Rev. Al Sharpton contended the mayor “is in denial” about the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ finding that the NYPD improperly uses racial profiling in stop-and-frisk operations.
Sharpton said the panel “just confirms what many of us have been saying all along.”
The report, approved 6-2 by the advisory panel, said the practice of racial profiling – identifying possible suspects primarily based on their race – can lead to “tragic and unnecessary” incidents like the Feb. 4, 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man who died in a hail of 41 police bullets in The Bronx.
The panel also calls into question NYPD recruitment of black and Hispanic officers, finds its diversity training “reinforces stereotypes instead of undermining them” – and recommends creation of an independent office to probe accusations that cops wrongly used deadly force.
“Once again the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has embarrassed itself by releasing a politicized report that bears no relation to reality,” Giuliani said in a statement.
He said the commission, set up to study NYPD practices after the Diallo shooting, “held only one meeting, conducted over the course of a single day.”
That fact, along with the acquittal of the four officers involved in the fatal shooting of the African immigrant, cast doubts on the report, the mayor said.
Police Commissioner Howard Safir also blasted the report as “inaccurate, shoddy and not … factual.”
Diallo’s mother, Kadiatou Diallo, said she hopes “the police learn from (the report) and improve the relationship between them and the community.”
The panel, after examining the department’s “stop and frisk” tactics, found blacks and Hispanics were stopped out of proportion to their representation in a given community.
For example, 51 percent of people stopped and searched in Staten Island in 1998 were black, while the borough’s population is only 9 percent black.
Commission chairwoman Mary Frances Berry said evidence showed such rates of minority searches belied police claims that blacks and Hispanics got stopped more frequently because they matched the descriptions from crime victims.
Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, whose office has been conducting a separate probe into alleged patterns and practices of NYPD brutality that began after the 1997 Abner Louima torture scandal, had no comment on the report.
Lynch’s office and the city have been in negotiations about potential reforms – and if talks fail, she could bring a lawsuit seeking a federal monitor.