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.