Washington Post
July 12, 2001
Louima to Receive Settlement in Brutality Case
By Michael Powell and Christine Haughney
NEW YORK -- Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was tortured and sodomized by police officers inside a precinct station bathroom in 1997, will receive an $8.7 million settlement from New York City and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.
It's the largest settlement in city history for a police brutality case.
Louima’s case has drawn international attention and come to symbolize the downside of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s much heralded war on crime, which saw the city’s homicide rate fall by 60 percent. Giuliani’s battle plan relied on streets stops, pat downs and arrests, and zero tolerance for unruly behavior.
But Louima's became the cautionary tale about police excess. A year after his assault, Louima sued for $155 million, asserting that officers in Brooklyn's 70th precinct conspired to fashion "a blue wall of silence and lies to obstruct justice." The police and union officials condoned an "environment in which the most violent police officers believe they would be insulated," his lawsuit charged.
A tentative settlement foundered in March when Louima refused to drop his demand that the New York Police department deal with officers accused of abuse.
A soft-spoken security guard, Louima was arrested in a brawl outside a nightclub on August 9, 1997. Officers handcuffed and took him to the police station. Once there, officer Justin Volpe claimed mistakenly that Louima had punched him.
Volpe and several white officers hauled Louima into a precinct bathroom. Volpe took a broken broomstick and sodomized Louima, and then plunged the stick into the victim's mouth, breaking two teeth. Volpe threatened to kill Louima if he complained about his treatment.
Louima suffered a punctured bladder and intestines, and was forced to wait more than 90 minutes before officers took him to a hospital. Charges against Louima were later dropped, and Louima testified about his ordeal in three criminal trials.
Volpe pleaded guilty and is serving 30 years. Another officer was convicted of pinning down Louima during the assault and juries found four other officers guilty of lying about what happened in the precinct house that night.
In the weeks following the police assault on Louima, activists took to the streets. And politicians accused Giuliani and his police chief of fostering a cowboy ethic in the police department.
In fact, the police record of brutality appears mixed. But there's no doubt that the department's successes have been marred by high profile bursts of police violence against civilians, particularly blacks and Latinos. Civil judgments against police officers have spiked in recent years. The city paid out $41 million last year to settle personal injury lawsuits filed by civilians against police officers, up from $14 million in 1990.
And the city Department of Corrections recently agreed to settle a class action lawsuit that challenged its practice of strip searching people arrested for minor quality of life offenses. The judgment is expected to cost the department about $50 million.
That said, the police department's reputation for brutality is overstated by some measures. New York City's police officers, for instance, are far less likely to shoot and kill than police officers in Prince George's County or Washington, D.C. From 1990 through 2000, Prince Georges's had 3.37 shootings per 1,000 officers; District police had 2.15 shootings per 1,000.
In New York City, by contrast, there are .71 fatal police shootings per 1,000 officers, a tad below the percentage of police shootings in Montgomery County.
Nor did Giuliani remain silent after Louima's beating. He decried the "blue wall of silence," denounced the perpetrators and urged officers to testify honestly about what transpired in that precinct house.
Copyright © 2001, Washington Post. All rights reserved.
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