Gary Busch: The Other NYPD Murder

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_other_nypd_murder

The American Prospect

Volume 11, Issue 20.

September 11, 2000.

The Other NYPD Murder

Harvey Blume

Two months after the fact, New York City Mayor Giuliani, purportedly mellowed by prostate cancer, issued an apology of sorts to the family of Patrick Dorismond, the unarmed Haitian-American man killed by New York police in March. The mayor did not apologize for the killing itself or for having personally unsealed Dorismond's juvenile police record the day after the event in a transparent attempt to defame Dorismond and justify the shooting, but he did say he regretted not having shown "compassion for ... a tragic situation." However meager this apology was, it is more than the mayor has ever extended toward the family of Gary Busch, the 31-year-old Hasidic man killed by police in Brooklyn just a year ago.

Gary Busch is the forgotten man on the roster of NYPD killings, a victim not only of 12 bullets fired by four policeman arrayed in a semi-circle around him, but of political and social circumstances that have conspired to make him invisible. Others who have suffered from NYPD overreaction or brutality--Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and Patrick Dorismond, to name but the best-known--have enjoyed some measure of public vindication, if only posthumously, largely because the communities from which they come have demanded it. Busch's death, like Dorismond's, points to systemic problems within the NYPD and a mayor all too quick to cover them up, but Busch did not get the kind of support from New York City's Jewish community that Dorismond got from Haitian Americans. In the event, the Jewish establishment proved better at venting about the Holocaust, which takes no particular courage or insight 50 years after the fact, than at assessing and responding to injustice right before its eyes.

Q&A Robert Reich — The Future of Success: What A Deal

Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review.

(Date approximate).

We are entering the Age of the Terrific Deal, where choices are almost limitless and it's easy to switch to something better. This is the first principle of the new economy. . . . This has long been the American way. It is now rapidly becoming the world way. America was founded by people who left places and abandoned old ways in search of a better deal. And if they didn't find it where they landed, they kept moving until they did.

     Robert Reich "The Future of Success"

Robert Reich was the Secretary of Labor during President Clinton's first term. Cofounder of the magazine, The American Prospect, his commentaries are often heard on National Public Radio. Reich's new book, "The Future of Success," a study of the new economy, starts with the story of his leaving the Clinton administration.

HB: If you had to explain what's new about the new economy while standing on one leg, what would you say?