Spitting Caves

I moved to New York about 11 years ago, at a time when the conventional wisdom was that the city was in the grips of a full-on malaise. In the few years before I got here, there had been a series of big crises that got a lot of media attention, and seemed to be very local in their character: Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, Crown Heights, and the Tompkins Square Park riots. I didn't know where those places were, but they were stitched together in my mind to form a sort of overall geography of conflict, and that's what I felt New York was.

I can remember when Rudy Giuliani was elected, because the "new sheriff in town" vibe started immediately. The crackdown on so-called "quality of life" crimes (are there any other kind?) started soon after. The scourge of squeegee men was eliminated, he got tough on sidewalk vending scofflaws, etc. There were bigger crime-fighting initiatives, too. Especially drugs--lots and lots of talk of fighting a local version of the drug war. Suddenly NYU professors and David Lee Roth were being arrested for buying pot in Washington Square Park. But I don't think many of us really understood how far Giuliani was taking this fight. Its true scope became abundantly clear exactly five years ago.

Late at night on March 15th, 2000 (actually early in the morning on the 16th), Patrick Dorismond and his friend Kevin Kaiser left a Times Square bar and decided to get a cab back to Brooklyn. (The first of many ironies regarding that evening is that both men worked as uniformed security guards for the 34th Street Partnership, an organization that performs various functions on behalf of local businesses.) Before they could hail a cab, a voice from the shadows beckoned Dorismond and asked if he had any pot to sell. Dorismond told him to beat it, but the guy wouldn't leave him alone. Kaiser urged his friend to ignore the man, but the guy wouldn't let up. He said something to Dorismond that made no sense: "What are you going to do, rob me?"

What happened next was widely reported, but the best reporting was done by former Times writer and Pulitzer winner Jim Dwyer in "Casualty In the War On Drugs," which appeared in Playboy in October 2000, and was reprinted in Busted , an excellent collection of articles and essays on drug policy and the drug war. (It looks like someone also transcribed the article here.) Immediately after the man asked his odd question, a few others emerged from behind him. Kaiser yelled that one of them had a gun; he and Dorismond obviously thought they were being mugged. At the same moment, a black SUV tore around the corner and deposited several men in police windbreakers. They yelled at Dorismond and Kaiser to drop to the ground, but at that moment Dorismond and one of the men he thought was mugging him were scuffling. One shot was fired at Dorismond, hitting him in the chest. He and Kaiser were thrown on the ground and cuffed. Dorismond, who was bleeding from the mouth, couldn't speak, but Kaiser, who thought the police had mistaken them for the muggers, tried to tell them they had the wrong guys. He was taken into custody and interrogated for several hours. Dorismond, who was 26, died soon after he was shot.

It turned out that everyone involved in this fracas, except for Dorismond and Kaiser, were members of Operation CONDOR, an elite police anti-drug task force spearheaded by Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir. "What are you going to do, rob me?" was a coded message that told the windbreaker-ed crew, listening on the wire, to swoop in and make the arrest. (CONDOR stood for Citywide Organized Narcotics Drug Operational Response, but "Operation Condor" was also the name of a Latin American death squad. When a City Council member pointed this out to Safir, the chief replied, "In case you didn't know, a condor is a bird.") CONDOR members were under pressure to make multiple arrests each time they went out. At the time of Dorismond's death, CONDOR had existed for two months and was averaging 350 arrests a day. Obviously, given this large number, many of these were low-level, barely misdemeanor arrests, but the emphasis was on quantity, which might explain why the group that accosted Dorismond felt so emboldened to force an arrest on someone who wasn't even giving the impression of committing a crime.

Giuliani, who was in the throes of his Senate campaign, went into full blowhard mode following the shooting. Less than a day had gone by before he and Safir unsealed and made public Dorismond's 13-year-old juvenile crime record. "I would not want a picture presented of an altar boy, when, in fact, maybe it isn't an altar boy," Giuliani said. Except that--whoops--it turned out Dorismond had been an altar boy--at the same Catholic high school Giuliani attended. But Giuliani didn't back down. The cop who shot Dorismond apologized to Dorismond's family (the shooting was ruled justified), but it was months before Giuliani did the same, after Dorismond's family sued the city (they lost).

The shooting of Amadou Diallo has become the symbol of that era's police excesses (his shooting also involved an elite crime-fighting unit), but I think the shooting of Patrick Dorismond, another unarmed black man (he was the son of Haitian immigrants), was even more egregious. As ludicrous as it was to fire 40-odd shots at a guy reaching for a cell phone, the Diallo event can at least be placed in a recognizable moral universe of cause and effect. There's an "Odessa Steps" quality to the whole thing, a series of miscommunications unfolding tragically over a few seconds. Dorismond, on the other hand, was just killed, by killers who completely manufactured the context of his killing. "Entrapment" doesn't even really cover what happened, since the word suggests a situation where someone had at least a vague notion to commit a crime.

Five years ago, Patrick Dorismond was murdered. As Giuliani continues to bask in the rapidly fading glow of 9/11, let's not forget how his policies laid the groundwork for this crime, and how he reacted in its aftermath. A man who had neither the ability nor the inclination to sell drugs was killed by people empowered to assume that he did. That's the ultimate irony of that night: "All Patrick Dorismond had to do that evening was surrender a joint, if he had one," Dwyer writes, "and he would have had a night in jail instead of the morgue."