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Bloomberg Should Meet With Haitian Community From the Haitian Times
January 9 - 15, 2002
During his improbable run for Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg spent millions of dollars on television advertising letting New Yorkers know everything he wanted them to know about him. In the end this tactic proved effective and the billionaire media mogul ended shocking this city with his victory over Democratic candidate, Mark Green. One of the drawbacks with this strategy was that while we learned about Bloomberg, he learned very little about many sectors of this city. Chiefly among them is the Haitian community. In the final days of the campaign, Bloomberg aides had scheduled a meeting with Haitian community leaders. But in the end, the candidate walked through Flatbush greeting people on the streets. Now that he has been sworn in, we strongly urge that Mayor Bloomberg make good on his campaign promise and meet with the Haitian community. His predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, was a polarizing force in our community and was unnecessarily hostile to us. He gave us two of the worst incidents of police brutality, Abner Louima and Patrick Dorismond. Giuliani denigrated Dorismond, insinuating that the man was responsible for being shot to death by the police. He alienated us and met only once with some community leaders and Giuliani never came to our neighborhood when there was seething anger over the police. That's not a way to lead any city, let alone New York. We believe that Bloomberg has a perfect chance to right this wrong. We are a new and emerging community. We're trying to figure out exactly where we belong in this "great mosaic." He needs to know our needs.
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