Within the last two years alone, law enforcement agencies across the United States have had to endure the neverending parade of embarrassing and cruel incidents by police officers against citizens. Numerous incidents have grasped the attention of people across the United States and resulted in a loss of public trust.

"Law enforcement officers threatened or used force in encounters with an estimated 500,000 people last year, according to a Justice Department survey released Saturday [November 22, 1997]. The force reported in the survey included being hit, pushed, choked, threatened by a flashlight, restrained by a dog and threatened by a dog. African-Americans and Hispanics make up about half of the people who have those kinds of experiences even though they represent only a fifth of the population of Americans aged 12 and older covered by the survey.

"This survey shows that police use of force is quite uncommon because the number of people reporting represents such a small fraction of the overall number of people who come into direct contact with the police every year," Chaiken said (Suro, 1997). (To see the full report click here.)

Conner's diminished faith in the city's police force appears to echo that of many Washington residents in recent weeks. And his concern is shared by many prominent criminologists and pubic-safety specialists, including former New York City police commissioner William Bratton, who presided over the largest crime drop in that city's history, from 1994 through last year."(Powell, 1997)

The ripple effect of just one incident is tremendous. This can be seen in the latest scandal to rock the New York City Police Department.



"A 25-year-old police officer was charged late [August thirteenth] with assaulting and brutalizing a Haitian immigrant in a Brooklyn station house bathroom after arresting him in a street scuffle, and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said that other officers might also be arrested. . . . Mr. Louima, 33, has told investigators that police officers beat him in the bathroom at the 70th Precinct station house, subjected him to racial slurs, and shoved the wooden handle of a toilet plunger into his rectum and then into his mouth." (Barry, 1997)

"The Republican mayor, responding to widespread outrage in the black community and to sharp criticism from his political opponents, transferred the commander and executive officers of the police station. He also ordered eight other officers in the precinct off active duty and suspended a sergeant who was in the station house on the night the Haitian was brutalized."(Harden, 1997a)

"Thousands of protesters marched on a police precinct Saturday where a Haitian immigrant says he was tortured and sodomized with a toilet plunger a week ago by two police officers. . . . Demonstrators, many waving toilet plungers, became increasingly hostile and shouted obscenities and insults at officers who stood impassively outside the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn." (Houston Chronicle (1997, August 16).

"Chanting "NYPD--New York Plunger Department," an angry but nonviolent crowd of about 7,000 people marched here today to protest the alleged police torture of a Haitian immigrant and demanded an end to what they said was an alarming pattern of police brutaltiy. About 2,500 police officers, many standing sullen-faced and clutching riot gear as some protesters taunted them for being "perverts" and "racists," lined the route of a march called by local Haitian leaders in response to the Aug. 9 assault on Abner Louima in the bathroom of a Brooklyn police station." (Harden, 1997b)

"About 200 protesters marched on the Justice Department yesterday demanding that the federal government do more to track and punish police brutality, before joining a hearing where victims of alleged police misconduct told their stories to members of the Congressional Black Caucus."(Fletcher, 1997)

On Friday, December 19, 1997, The New York Times reported on the the disciplinary system of NYPD.
Attacked from the outside as too lenient and criticized by officers as a star chamber where even small infractions are punished in a system manipulated by ranking officials, the internal discpline system is at the center of an increasingly heated debate over civillian oversight of the police" (Kocieniewski, 1997).