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.
Going by his Hebrew name, Gideon, Gary Busch had been living
in his one-room basement apartment in Borough Park for eight months when the police,
summoned by a neighbor complaining about noise, came to his door on the evening
of w. Busch was a ba'al teshuvah, the Jewish version of being born again. Ever
since leaving medical school in 1995, when he was diagnosed with a chronic
kidney ailment, he had pursued a spiritual approach to the world that led,
ultimately, to his dedicating himself to Halacha, or the observance of Jewish
law. In Israel he belonged for a time to a small sect of Hasidim whose rabbi
claimed to have a letter straight from God by way of Rabbi Nachman, one of the
fore-fathers of Hasidism. Back in the United States, he moved away from this
group, whose practices of chanting and fasting tested the bounds of Orthodoxy,
without sacrificing his ambition to lead a spiritually intense life. He lived
for a time with his mother, Doris Busch Boskey, in Long Island but moved to
Borough Park, a Hasidic enclave, because, as Rabbi Dov Sears, who talked to him
frequently in Brooklyn, put it: "He wanted to be where the davenning
[praying] was beautiful."
When Gary Busch answered the door that evening in August, he
was wearing a yarmulke, as always, as well as tefillin, or phylacteries, the
small leather boxes the Orthodox bind around the arm and forehead during
prayer. In addition he was holding a small hammer. This hammer took on
inordinate importance in what was to follow, with police repeatedly stressing
the fact that it was a "claw" hammer, as if that made it anything
other than an ordinary household tool. If there were anything unusual about the
hammer, it was that Busch had transformed it into a religious object,
inscribing two of the Hebrew names of God--YHVH and Elohim--on its handle, and
integrating it into his prayers: Busch's fiancie, Netanya Ullman, reports that
Gary called the hammer his "staff" and would sometimes hold it aloft
while praying, making slow tai chi-like movements directed at the heavens.
Two of the policemen had encountered Gary Busch earlier that
day, when called by a neighbor who may have been nonplussed by the fact that
Percy Freeman, a homeless black man Busch occasionally fed, was visiting Busch.
In any case, police found nothing amiss and took no action. On the second
visit, police pulled Freeman out of the apartment, threw him to the ground, and
handcuffed him. Another officer leaned over the railing above the door to the
apartment and sprayed Busch in the face with pepper spray. Busch, screaming,
evidently in pain and quite possibly unable to see--blinding being a common
effect of pepper spray--rushed frantically up the stairs to the sidewalk,
brushing against police on his way. It was this glancing and unintentional
moment of physical contact that police reports were to magnify into an armed
assault that could be neutralized only with deadly force.
On the sidewalk, Busch backed into a brick wall, still
screaming and clutching the hammer on high, as if, according to one eyewitness,
"this little hammer was going to protect him." Four policeman
surrounded Busch, with two others across the street and members of the Emergency
Services Unit on the way. The cops ordered Busch to drop the hammer. When he
didn't, one fired. There was a short pause, then 11 more shots. Busch lay
bleeding on the ground, fatally wounded and, for some crucial minutes, untended
as police turned their attention to pushing back onlookers. To many of these,
the sight of a man conspicuously arrayed in the garments of Judaism, and cut
down as he impotently raised a hammer toward the sky, was likely a nightmare
vision straight out of the European past they or their parents had escaped. One
eyewitness, Raphael Eisenberg, told me: "I know what I saw. I saw a police
execution." In the days and weeks following the shooting, many witnesses
came forward to say much the same thing.
Police canvassed witnesses, looking for testimony that Busch
had been the aggressor. According to one onlooker, when they heard anything
that did not fit this version of events, they crumpled the page they were
writing on and moved along. Right there, at the site of the shooting, the
cover-up had really and truly begun. In fact, it may have begun still earlier,
during the shooting itself. One plausible explanation for why 12 bullets were
fired at an unarmed man is that police were determined not to let one of their
number take the fall for a manifestly bad shooting and, after a pause, covered
that first shot with the deadly volley. In any case, the blue wall of silence
descended directly after the shooting, when all four cops professed themselves
unable to remember who among them had fired first.
Gary Busch was dead on arrival at Maimonides Hospital, where
he was maintained for hours as "John Doe," as if the police had any
doubts about his address or identity. Newscasters, at any rate, entertained no
such doubts. It was from the 10:00 p.m. news that Doris Busch Boskey, Gary's
mother, learned that her son had been killed. Maintaining Busch as a John Doe
was one of the many ways police deflected attention from the body and the site
of the shooting for as long as possible. When Glenn Busch, Gary's brother,
arrived at the scene that night, he was shunted from Borough Park's 69th
Precinct, where his presence might have been a lightning rod for Hasidic anger
at the police, to the 70th Precinct, which had the unhappy distinction of being
the station house where Abner Louima had been tortured. Pressed by detectives
to talk about his brother's "mental state," Glenn Busch, an attorney,
got his first inkling that something was terribly wrong with police behavior in
this case, and demanded, instead, to know "about the mental state of the
police who killed my brother."
Gary Busch's mental state would loom as large as the claw
hammer in police accounts. In the police story, Busch was a madman on a
rampage, and officers did no more than was necessary to protect themselves and
bystanders from harm. But portraying Busch as deranged was not without
drawbacks for the police. There are clear protocols for officers to follow in
encounters with the mentally ill, protocols that advise against the use of pepper
spray; enjoin police to wait for the arrival of the specially trained Emergency
Services Unit, which, in this case, officers knew was on the way; and stress
that the "primary duty is to preserve human life... . Deadly physical
force will be used ONLY as a last resort." If, as they claimed, Gary Busch
was mentally disturbed, then police were guilty of multiple violations of their
own guidelines in dealing with him, and this fact was not lost on the press.
But despite the charges of misconduct to which it exposed them, the portrayal
of Busch as hammer-wielding madman worked to police advantage in the long run.
Though it could not be substantiated, the image never fully dissipated, and it
gave further pause to anyone disinclined to challenge police authority.
Because the police made so much of it, it is logical to ask
about Gary Busch's mental state and his character. According to Glenn Busch,
Gary had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for which he had been briefly
hospitalized on several occasions. The disorder manifested itself most notably
in Busch's periods of depression and withdrawal, but also, perhaps, in his
manic moods of religious enthusiasm. As Rabbi Sears pointed out, donning
tefillin in the evening, as Busch did on occasion, is frowned upon by
tradition, according to which only during the Talmudic era were Jews deemed
worthy of wearing tefillin at any time other than at morning prayer. That he
wore tefillin when custom discouraged it may well have been a sign that, as he
confided to Sears, Busch saw himself as singled out, destined for a special
purpose.
The classic portrayal of a bipolar personality in a
religious context is Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, Gershom Scholem's
magisterial biography of the seventeenth-century Jewish messiah. Sabbatai Sevi
went from the heights of elation, when he would violate Jewish law with a
prayer of thanks to God for permitting that which was forbidden, to the literal
depths of the Sultan's dungeons, where he was made to abjure any notion that he
was the promised one who would lead the Jews back to Palestine. Other studies
of bipolar personality, notably those by Kay Redfield Jamison, show how deeply
consonant this personality type is with both religious and artistic vocations.
Busch's occasional low moods, together with his periods of
exaltation, during which he might bend or extend the norms of Judaism, seem to
conform to the bipolar type. But however illuminating this may be about the
conjunction of psychology and spirituality, it no more justified what happened
to Gary Busch on the evening of August 30 than Patrick Dorismond's juvenile
record justified his being shot by police the following March. Busch was a
sought-after Shabbat guest in homes throughout Borough Park and the wider New
York and New Jersey Hasidic communities in which he traveled. Hundreds of
people from these communities attended his funeral in Long Island, many of them
testifying to what Rabbi Sears characterized as Gary Busch's idealism and his
"talent" for human interaction. Gary Busch was a seeker who learned
over time to balance his deep religious feelings with the demands of day-to-day
existence, in his last year completing a course of study in computer science
and setting up shop as a free-lance Web designer. Most important: Never, except
in the self-serving police reports issued after the shooting, had Busch been
accused of violence.
During the night of August 30, a crowd of up to 1,000
Hasidim, some of them chanting "Cossack" and "Nazi" at
police, took to the streets in Borough Park. Mayor Giuliani could
sustain--perhaps even welcome--an adversarial relationship to New York City's
Haitian and West African communities, but the district that includes Borough
Park had returned an 88 percent vote for him in the last election, and he could
not hope to defeat Hillary Clinton in the anticipated New York Senate race
without this Hasidic backing. Working late into the night, mayoral aides
rounded up 20 Borough Park rabbis and community leaders for an 8:30 meeting at
City Hall the next morning. With the mayor at his side, Police Commissioner
Howard Safir announced that patrolmen had fired on Busch only when pepper spray
failed to deter him from assaulting "two fallen officers, smashing his
hammer repeatedly into one of them." Safir boasted of "seven
independent witnesses who confirm ... [that] as he continued to hit the
sergeant with the claw hammer, the police fired 12 shots."
This account came apart almost as soon as it was delivered.
The New York Times, for example, shortly reported that "investigators have
been unable to find a single witness, much less seven, who described the
shooting the way Mr. Safir did." Readers of New York newspapers also
learned that the city's medical examiner was unable to find gunpowder residues
on Busch's clothing, indicating that all 12 bullets had been fired from a
distance, rather than from up close, as would have been the case had any of the
police been under attack. Stripped of Safir's fabrications, the shooting of
Gary Busch could be seen for what it was, a police killing even more flagrant
in its way than that of Amadou Diallo. In the case of Diallo, it was night; he
had reached for a wallet that panicking police could claim they thought was a
gun. No such circumstances pertained with regard to Busch: It was daylight when
he was killed; he had no gun; and, praying in his apartment, he posed no threat
to anyone.
With the police account in shreds, this was a moment
political action could have shifted the focus of attention from Gary Busch's
supposed mental state and his claw hammer to, as Glenn Busch put it, "the
mental state of the police who killed my brother." Public pressure applied
at this juncture would have made it more difficult for a hastily assembled
grand jury, called a week after the shooting, to clear police of all wrongdoing
before anything like a full investigation could be carried out.
However, the political will needed to contend with Giuliani
and Safir was absent in New York City's Jewish community. After meetings with
Giuliani, the Hasidic leadership cut protest off at its source in Borough Park,
plastering the neighborhood with leaflets that warned followers not to commit
"Chilul Hashem," or profanation of the name of God, by taking to the
streets. In many ways, Hasidic docility is easier to understand than the
indecision, disorientation, and indifference displayed by other Jewish groups.
The Hasidim had a kind of quid pro quo going with Giuliani. He would offer them
police protection of the kind they felt they lacked under David Dinkins, the
previous mayor, and--regardless of the fact that he couldn't offer them
protection from the police itself--the rabbis, in turn, would guarantee a solid
proGiuliani bloc at the polls. In addition Giuliani was friendly to the kind of
subtle erosions of the separation of church and state--as in privately funded
vouchers for religious schooling--that played well in Hasidic neighborhoods.
The same line of reasoning helps to explain the inaction of Agudath Israel, the
influential organization of the Orthodox, which, according to spokesman Rabbi
Avi Shaffran, "let investigation take its course [in the case of Gary
Busch]. It did, and turned up little to be concerned about."
But what could account for the fact that Tikkun magazine,
organ of a supposed Jewish renewal and a supposed Jewish left, could wax
eloquent on the subject of Amadou Diallo--with editor Peter Gabel intoning that
Diallo's fate filled him with nostalgia for the Black Panthers and made him
long for "Malcolm X to resume his pulpit on the corner of 125th Street
calling on blacks to arm themselves"--but have precisely nothing to say on
the subject of Gary Busch? Tikkun was joined in this resounding silence by its
opposite numbers in the Jewish establishment, including the American Jewish
Congress and the American Jewish Committee.
As for the Forward, New York City's largest Jewish weekly,
it did, initially, allot space to Dov Hikind, a state assemblyman from Borough
Park, who arrived at the scene shortly after the shooting and, from the first,
refused to credit the Giuliani/Safir version of events. Hikind wrote, "In
my 17 years in office, I have been a strong and consistent supporter of the
police department... . But do not expect a knee-jerk reaction from me when
deadly mistakes are made. I cannot and will not close my eyes." But then,
in an editorial, the Forward quickly reverted to Cold War form, worrying far
more that the Hasidim would wind up as political putty in the hands of Reverend
Al Sharpton than that the circumstances of Gary Busch's death would be covered
up and forgotten. The editorial refers to Giuliani in clubby fashion as
"Hizzoner" and faithfully repeats the crucial elements of Safir's
story, calling Gary Busch "an unbalanced ba'al teshuva ... killed after
threatening a policeman with a hammer."
One of the peculiar--and to the Forward,
unsettling--consequences of the shooting was that it did bring some of Reverend
Al Sharpton's most bitter enemies around to seeing the point of campaigns
against police brutality. Writing in The Jewish Press, generally the most right
wing of the city's Jewish weeklies, Rabbi Shmuel Kunda compared the Jewish
community's willingness to accede to the police version of events to the
"reaction in the black community to the murder of Amadou Diallo. The noise
and protests continue to be heard throughout their neighborhoods, and
rightfully so!"
The Jewish Press has continued to keep Gary Busch before its
readership, striking at various Hasidic prejudices along the way. To many
Hasidim, Yankel Rosenbaum, killed by blacks during disturbances in Crown
Heights in 1991, has taken on the status of a martyr, whereas Gary Busch,
killed by police, has seemed a more equivocal case. Kunda has attacked this
bias head-on: "In truth, was the murder of [Gideon] Busch any less brutal,
any less senseless, any less cold blooded than that of Yankel Rosenbaum? Was it
less painful for his family and friends? Does it deserve less of a response and
attention from us? ... Think about the message that our indifference sends to
all the New York City cops and to their brass and to the man in City
Hall." And in March, long after most other organs of opinion had forgotten
Gary Busch, a Jewish Press editorial asked: "Why is Hillary Clinton only
concerned about how Amadou Diallo's death pointed to systemic problems in the
NYPD but not Gideon Busch's? ... how is it that our glorious Jewish leaders
have yet to utter any criticism of Mayor Giuliani's shameful role in closing
off any investigation of the NYPD's role in Busch's death?"
The Jewish Press has been joined in its consistent stand on
Gary Busch by Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, a liberal group with
roots in the Upper West Side B'nai Jeshrun congregation, but these are the
exceptions. Consider, for example, the behavior of the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL). The ADL has taken no stand on the shooting of Gary Busch, but when the
Whitney Biennial opened in March, the organization was quick to oppose the
showing of a piece by Hans Haacke, in which some of Rudolph Giuliani's
especially demagogic remarks about art (along with some of Pat Buchanan's
racist remarks) are displayed on the wall in Fraktur, the favorite typeface of
the Nazis. In a press release, the ADL registered its opposition to this piece
on the grounds that "Mr. Haacke's use of Nazi imagery ... trivializes the
horrors of the Holocaust and denigrates the memory of the six million Jews and
others who were killed by the Nazis." How so? Haacke's piece did not
mention the Holocaust. Is the ADL implying that anyone who refers to Hitler or
the Nazis must first tag on a few ADL-approved sentiments about the Holocaust?
Perhaps the ADL's addled stance--silence with regard to Busch, activism with
regard to Haacke--should be seen as a sign of deep deracination within the
organization. Or perhaps it's simply easier for the ADL to chase Holocaust
ghosts than to confront a living, and easily angered, New York City mayor.
The affair of Gary Busch can be broken down into three
parts. The first is the killing itself. I got a feeling for the loss Gary Busch's
family sustained when I visited his basement apartment with Doris Busch, who
has maintained the residence in his memory. Gary had been close to his mother
throughout his life--Glenn Busch tells me they had a common artistic
temperament--and several of her paintings were on the walls, including a
seascape and a country lane. It was in this apartment that I also met Netanya
Ullman, Gary's fiancie, a tall, warm 25-year-old woman who shared Gary's
passion for Judaism and who came to Borough Park the night of the shooting
expecting to accompany Busch to a friend's wedding.
The second strata of the Busch affair is the cover-up, signs
of which remain evident in the apartment itself, torn apart by police in the
immediate wake of the shooting in a frantic and fruitless search for drugs or
weapons. The third element of the Busch affair is the inability of New York
City's large and powerful Jewish community to react. This, no doubt, is partly
due to a few too many deals struck between the Hasidic leadership and the
Giuliani regime. It is due, as well, to a rift within the Jewish world that
separates ultra-Orthodox Jews from others and that prevents united action.
Then, of course, it's more prudent in New York City today to denounce Hitler
than to challenge Giuliani, and if one does the former loudly enough, it is
almost possible to disguise one's fear about doing the latter. Finally, the
effects of Halachic correctness (HC) on political response cannot be
underestimated. HC has taken the place of PC in the lives of many Jews, among
whom a newfound fussiness about the fine points of liturgy serves to dull
awareness of inconvenient political realities.
Thanks to the persistence of the Busch family and the
efforts of its few allies, the Gary Busch affair is far from over. Doris Busch
Boskey is organizing a public vigil in memory of her son on August 30, outside
his old Borough Park apartment. The Justice Department is investigating the
shooting, and the family is pressing a civil lawsuit against Mayor Giuliani and
Police Commissioner Safir.
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