Twenty years after thousands of people marched with the Rev. Al Sharpton to protest the bias killing of Michael Griffith, a 23-year-old African-American New Yorker in Howard Beach, a similar killing this month of Michael Sandy, a 28-year-old gay African-American New Yorker, has produced no march through Brooklyn.
Sandy was attacked on October 8th at Plumb Beach. He fled his assailants, escaping onto the Belt Parkway, where he was struck by a car. His family took him off a respirator on October 13th. Three days later, there was finally a public expression of outrage, when mostly African American gay leaders held a press conference and vowed to work to change the “environment” in New York from which such crimes spring.
But how else to explain the relatively muted response to what Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes has classified as a hate crime than to note how much the environment has changed in New York?
In 1986, New York State had no hate crimes law , allowing more severe penalties for assaults motivated by bias based on race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation. The bill, drafted in response to the Howard Beach incident, easily passed the Democrat-led Assembly but was held up by the Republican-dominated Senate for 14 years. The senators either rejected the notion that a bias attack was worse than any other attack, or they did not want to pass any bill that protected gay people as a class. The bill finally passed in 2000, followed by the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in 2003.
Hynes, who was a special prosecutor in the Howard Beach case, was a prime mover of the hate crimes bill and is now using the law to prosecute the alleged perpetrators in the Sandy case.
The 1989 racially motivated murder of Yusef Hawkins, a young African American, by a gang of whites in Bensonhurst was widely seen as one of the key reasons the city turned to Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, a black man, to be mayor that year.
Dinkins himself was done in partly by what was seen as an inadequate response to the Crown Heights incidents in 1990 when masses of African Americans, incensed at the death of a black child, Gavin Cato, after being hit a Hasidic limo driver, rioted and Yankel Rosenbaum, a young rabbinical student, was killed.
Dinkins was succeeded by Rudy Giuliani, another mayor with a reputation as a polarizer and for siding with police in almost every dispute with communities of color. In 1997, Abner Louima, a Haitian man, was sexually abused by Police Officer Justin Volpe at a Brooklyn precinct house, sparking outrage. Volpe got 30 years and City Hall paid an $8.75 million settlement to Louima.
In 1999, when police from the Street Crimes Unit fired 41 bullets into Amadou Diallo , an innocent and unarmed African man in the Bronx, weeks of marches and demonstrations ensued and 1700 were arrested, with scores more getting arrested at police headquarters to demand the indictment of the officers who were eventually acquitted in a trial moved to Albany.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg tried to set a different tone on taking office in 2002, publicly meeting with Rev. Sharpton, also widely viewed as a polarizing figure and someone with whom Giuliani refused to meet. Giuliani, in fact, virtually never met with black elected officials including such relatively non-confrontational ones as Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields.
This past June, several hundred gay people marched from the East Village site where African American drag artist Kevin Aviance had been assaulted coming out of a gay club. Police were quick to arrest suspects in that attack as they had been in the Sandy case--responses that helped mute community outrage in both instances.
Back in October 1998 when Matthew Shepherd , a gay, blond, slight 22-year old college student was brutally murdered by gaybashers in Wyoming, there was a nationwide response with a demonstration of more than 9,000 in New York that tied up traffic and led to scores of arrests. The aftermath of his death was dramatized by a play called “The Laramie Project” by Moises Kaufman that is now one of the most performed plays in the country by high school and college companies.
The more muted response to Michael Sandy’s murder can be explained by a variety of factors, some less edifying than others:
First, police were quick in arresting the suspects.
Second, street activism in New York, save for some big anti-war actions in the last three years, is at an almost all-time low as people are more likely to agitate on the Internet than through public demonstrations.
Third, without minimizing the horrible crime against Sandy, he was reportedly tricked into thinking his assailant was someone like him seeking a sexual hook-up via the Internet. The sexual aspect of the case may have led fewer people to take up his case as a cause. While Sandy’s desire to meet for sex is shared by thousands of New Yorkers, the attack on him is a caution never to agree to an anonymous rendezvous in an isolated area. That the alleged perpetrators of the attack on him are believed to have gotten away with rolling other gay men in this way is a testament to the fact that such victims often still are afraid to go to the police and that gay liberation--even in New York--has a long way to go.
Fourth, some black gay bloggers, like Jasmyne Cannick , believe race and sexual orientation played a role in the lack of a response. She wrote that “we have the Black leadership that has basically looked the other way because Sandy was gay and then we have the gay leadership who has looked the other way because he was Black.”
Fifth, gay people have made great progress in recent years, including the election of Christine Quinn, an out lesbian, to the second most powerful post in the city, Speaker of the City Council. That kind of seat at the table gives the community a sense that officialdom will take care of it. Indeed, Mayor Mike Bloomberg said in the wake of Sandy’s murder, “this crime was a grave matter and was given immediate attention at all levels of city government.” He also affirmed, “New York is a city where diversity is celebrated and tolerance is practiced, and today we reaffirm our efforts and stand united to fight those who threaten those values.”
On October 16, the black gay leaders who protested Sandy’s murder didn’t take it to the streets, but to the steps of City Hall. Michael Roberson of the HIV/AIDS group People of Color in Crisis said that they needed to challenge “church, school and family norms about the value of black gay men’s lives.” Bishop Zachary Jones of the black and gay Unity Fellowship Church said, “We will not tolerate messages of hate from schools and pulpits.”
But for all the talk of changing the environment that fosters anti-gay bigotry such as that that killed Michael Sandy, most New Yorkers belong to religions that teach that homosexuality is sinful, even if a minority of religious leaders here use the kind of crude anti-gay language some fundamentalists are famous for. And Mayor Bloomberg refuses to implement the City Council’s 2004 anti-bullying law --calling it “illegal” and “silly." New York City’s schools do not even collect serious statistics on bullying incidents.
Clarence Patton, director of the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project of New York , put forth a four-point program to change the environment in New York, calling on the city to work on mitigating hate violence “between major hate crimes,” encouraging survivors of such crimes to come forward and making more services available to them, and developing strategies for gay people that will “result not only in our taking responsibility for our own safety, but that of others in the lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual community.”
Â
It is an all-too-typical scenario: An immigrant woman has been battered continuously by a spouse. Now he has abandoned her, or she has escaped from their home, and she is indigent. The twist is that he is a legal immigrant, but her legal status depended on her relationship to him. She has no one to turn to for support except the government.
But in New York that support has not been forthcoming, according to the findings of federal Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York, in a case known as M.K.B. vs. Eggleston.
"It is not the policy of the United States or the State of New York to leave destitute the battered immigrant wives and children of lawful U.S. residents just because their abusive husbands are no longer supporting them or providing them with a basis for obtaining aid," Rakoff wrote in his 83-page decision, but “just such dire consequences are occurring….” Both New York City and New York State, the judge ruled, have been violating the rights of the plaintiffs in the case (and others in the same situation) through a lack of oversight, computer foul-ups, failure to train staff, distribution of materials that misstated the law, and failure to take remedial steps when learning of these breaches.
The 13 plaintiffs in the case, according to attorney Scott Rosenberg of the Legal Aid Society, include the Jamaican woman known by her initials, M.K.B., who was eight months pregnant when her husband threatened to kill her with an ice pick, and to feed rat poison to the children. Another plaintiff from Jamaica, “LW”, was raped by her husband when she did not comply with certain sexual demands. “Ms. Diongue” from Senegal was tortured for five hours by her sister's boyfriend who had just strangled and murdered her sister. “Al” from Bangladesh had a husband so jealous that he assumed that by going to work she was sleeping with other men; he hit her and threatened to kill her, and then threw her out of the home, but would not let her take their baby daughter.
What the findings in the case establish is that benefits are routinely denied to women such as these because the applicants lack documentation in the form of social security numbers, green cards or other indications of legal status. Yet, the law’s purpose is to provide for the health and safety of vulnerable women and children whose supposed protectors were instead their tormentors.
Training manuals and other materials omit abused or battered qualified applicants from lists of immigrants eligible for state public assistance and Medicaid, and for federal food stamps. Workers did not know how to deal with situations where some members of a family were eligible and others were not. They did not understand and were not trained to work with the specific abused immigrant population under the "battered alien" provision of law, which gives rights and benefits to abused women and children who are not legal residents of the United States to which they would not otherwise be entitled. Even when city and state policy makers were made aware of the rampant problems, "no meaningful corrective action was taken."
Welfare workers were repeatedly told in writing and at training sessions, of the requirement that applicants present a social security card, when that was in clear violation of law. The same applied to green cards, citizenship papers, which are also not required, and the special exemptions under the Violence Against Women Act. A question that benefit workers would have to answer was: "Does there appear to be a substantial connection between the battery or extreme cruelty and the need for the benefits sought?" Yet there were no standards to apply and thus no way to assure that the decisions by the staff were not subjective and arbitrary. Moreover, if the worker miscoded a file, say, checking off "citizen" when that was incorrect, the applicant could later be charged with fraud, worsening the problems she came to the center with.
In unambiguous language, the court cited the city with "deliberate indifference," found that policymakers knew "to a moral certainty" that its employees would confront the types of situations at issue and performed in a manner that violated law and the Consitution. The Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York has found that the plaintiffs and all others similarly situated were "erroneously denied public assistance, Medicaid benefits and/or food stamps in violation of their federal and state rights.”
The plaintiffs were represented by the Legal Aid Society (with Hughes Hubbard and Reed), the City of New York by Corporation Counsel, and the State by the Attorney General.
Emily Jane Goodman is a New York State Supreme Court JusticeÂ
As a deterrent to terrorist attacks on a "prime target," subway searches of passengers' bags are constitutional, according to a decision by a federal appeals court, and the searches will be allowed to continue.
The court rejected a lawsuit known as Brendan MacWade against New York City/NYPD, in which the New York Civil Liberties Union argued on behalf of five individuals include MacWade that the searches violated the 4th Amendment to the Constitution which prohibits unreasonable searches. The lawsuit also claimed that the searches have not been shown to be effective, and that there is no imminent threat of attack. The appeals court, however, agreed with the defendants and the trial judge, that this is a "special needs" case -- "protecting mass transportation facilities from terrorist attack" -- and therefore reasonable and lawful.
It is the city's position that the searches are voluntary because anyone who does not wish to have a bag search is not searched. But that person cannot enter the subway. The five plaintiffs (MacWade, Andrew Schonebaum, Joseph E. Gehring, Jr., Partha Banerjee and Norman Murphy) either consented to a bag search or refused consent and were therefore not allowed to enter the subway.
In addition to the argument that the search is voluntary, the court found that there are sufficient built-in safeguards against unreasonable searches to protect the privacy of riders. The searches are conducted at various checkpoints which are not disclosed in advance. They are random, meaning every fourth or eighth person (or whatever the number is that day) is stopped. The searches were considered non intrusive because they are of bags and parcels, not people, and do not involve looking into small objects that do not appear to be dangerous.
But danger was the theme of the two-day non-jury trial that lead to this appeal. The city called three experts on terrorism and on the subway system. Based on their testimony, a history of the system and of terrorism, the Circuit Court concluded that the search program "serves a paramount government interest."
The court found that the expert testimony established that the searches "have created an environment in New York City that has made it more difficult for terrorists to operate." At the same time, the decision points to previous plots to bomb the subway that defendants say they thwarted. Similarly the judges held that the New York Police Department "designed the program chiefly to deter terrorists from carrying concealed explosives onto the subway system and compared it with searches at airports and public buildings.”
Based, then, on the government interest in deterrence, the minimal intrusion into privacy and the safeguards that are in place, "preventing a terrorist from bombing the subways is paramount" and outweighs the New York Civil Liberties arguments. The action was dismissed.
According to Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU, no decision has been made about an appeal. But lawyers and law professors interviewed all agreed that an appeal, if heard by the Washington court, would be unsuccessful.
The city was represented by the Corporation Counsel and the law firm of Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett LLP. Emily Jane Goodman is a New York State Supreme Court JusticeÂ