Mugged (5 page)

To the satisfaction of
New York Times
editors, who managed to avoid all day-to-day contact with any black people, everyone walked on eggshells, afraid of making a career-ending slip of the tongue.

In 1988, Jimmy Snyder, known as “Jimmy the Greek,” a football personality, was instantly fired from CBS News for attributing blacks’ athletic
prowess to breeding by slave owners: “During the slave period, the slave owner would breed his big black with his big woman so that he could have a big black kid—that’s where it all started.”
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For devotees of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Snyder’s theory shouldn’t have been controversial, much less offensive. But he had mentioned slavery, so he was a racist.

The one taboo so powerful that even an elderly sports commentator couldn’t have missed it was that no one was allowed to notice the increasing criminality among blacks.

The black crime rate was skyrocketing—thanks, Great Society programs!—but the cases that routinely drew huge national attention, requiring months of soul-searching and exegeses about a larger societal problem, were the occasional white-on-black crimes.

Any violence committed by a white person against a black person was the occasion for marches, rallies, and conclusion jumping. Inasmuch as a white person physically attacking a black person was remarkably rare, the majority of these cases involved police officers. Every black person who was shot by the police, or who died in police custody, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, became a beloved member of our community, killed by racism. Most people will generally take the word of a cop over that of a criminal, but most people are not reporters for the
New York Times
.

It’s time for a little retrospective on the lynch mobs of yesteryear, not only because they deserve it, but because the racial-grievance machinery has been warmed up again to defend the angel Obama. Let’s review what life in America was like before the OJ verdict set us free.

ELEANOR BUMPURS—1984

In 1984, sixty-six-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs, a mentally disturbed black woman, stopped paying the rent on her $98.65 a month apartment in public housing. She claimed she was not paying the rent because various appliances in her apartment were broken. But when the government sent a maintenance man over, she refused to open the door and threatened to throw boiling lye in his face (and not because he was an overpaid public-sector worker with an outrageous pension).

Eventually, the maintenance man was admitted. He found everything in working order, except the buckets of feces Bumpurs kept in her bathtub.
As for that, she explained, “Reagan and his people had done it,”
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qualifying her for a job with the
New York Times
.

A city psychiatrist was called in. He diagnosed Bumpurs as psychotic, emotionally disturbed and possibly dangerous.”
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The city’s housing authority tried contacting Bumpurs’s children, but receiving no reply, asked the police to take Bumpurs to a mental institution. She refused to unlock the door for the police and threatened them with boiling lye, too.

After cutting through the locks and opening the door, the six-man police emergency squad, armed with plastic shields and a Y-shaped restraining bar, found all three hundred pounds of Eleanor Bumpurs glowering at them, completely naked and brandishing a ten-inch carving knife. During the ensuing negotiations, Bumpurs knocked the restraining bar out of one officer’s hands, causing him to fall, and lunged at another cop with her knife. Officer Stephen Sullivan fired two rounds from a shotgun at Bumpurs, killing her.

And it was all because she was black!
The officers were white and Bumpurs was black, so a hue and cry went up about the cops’ racist attack on a helpless black grandmother. Whenever police officers encounter three-hundred-pound naked white women trying to carve them up with ten-inch carving knives, they sit and have tea.

A Bronx jury indicted the officer who shot Bumpurs for second-degree manslaughter, a judge dismissed the indictment, and then an appellate court reinstated it. But because of the rallies and protests demanding “justice” for Bumpurs, no judge would take the case. (Cops always requested bench trials in brutality cases so that their fate would not rest in the hands of jurors, who could be influenced by political agitation.)

In the end, the case was assigned to a judge who was about to retire and would not be facing reelection.
⁵
Pre-OJ, everything was an ordeal if a black person was involved.

Spectators mobbed the courthouse, staging demonstrations inside and outside. They unfurled banners and shouted “Liar!,” “Cover-up!,” “Convict Stephen Sullivan!,” “Stephen Sullivan murderer!” and “Sullivan guilty!” This required frequent recesses.
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Days before the judge ruled, a bomb ripped through police union headquarters, blowing through a wall and destroying two sinks. A phone call later claimed the bomb had been sent to protest “racist murder and killer cops” in the Bumpurs case.

Sullivan was acquitted. Hundreds of police officers requested transfer out of the emergency squad.

MICHAEL STEWART—SEPTEMBER 15, 1983

It was also deemed a clear-cut case of racism in September 1983, when police arrested Michael Stewart, “artist.” Transit police had caught Stewart on his way home from a New York City dance club at three a.m., scrawling graffiti on a subway station wall. On the basis of that fact, the media henceforth referred to Stewart as an “artist.”

Stewart ran from the cops and fought violently when they caught him. He was charged with criminal mischief, resisting arrest and possession of marijuana.

Although some witnesses claimed they had seen the police beating Stewart at the subway station,
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he apparently recovered. In the van to the precinct, Stewart arched over the back of his seat and began kicking the driver and officer in the front passenger seat. Upon their arrival at precinct headquarters, Stewart again tried to run. He was so combative that nearly a dozen officers were involved at some point in trying to subdue Stewart.

One officer who came out of the station, a sergeant who had been on the force for eighteen years, called Stewart a “violent psycho.”
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He said Stewart was bucking, kicking and screaming at the top of his lungs. Even when he was on the ground with his hands cuffed, Stewart kept trying to grab the officers’ legs. Several cops were required to bind Stewart’s ankles with gauze to get him to stop kicking. All this took place in front of the Union Square Precinct, which is surrounded by apartment buildings, restaurants and crowds of late-night revelers.

On the basis of Stewart’s behavior, police believed he was emotionally disturbed and decided to take him to Bellevue for psychiatric evaluation. By the time they arrived, Stewart had stopped breathing and had to be revived. He fell into a coma, contracted pneumonia and, thirteen days later, he died.

Hospital tests determined that Stewart’s blood alcohol level was .22, twice the legal limit, which according to the medical examiner was the equivalent of a dozen beers or eight whiskeys.
⁹
Or, in the words of a
New York Times
editorial about the “young artist and model,” his “blood alcohol level was elevated.”
¹⁰

The officers were white and Stewart was black. So, naturally,
Times
editors asked themselves: What else could explain his death but that the NYPD was jam-packed with Klan members?

The
Times
ran more than a hundred stories on the case, described by
black activists “as the latest example of ‘racially motivated police violence,’” invariably referring to Stewart as an “artist.”
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This was in the mid-eighties, when any accusation of racism created mass hysteria—and the
Times
was accusing everyone involved of racism. As a result, there were two grand-jury investigations, three criminal indictments, dismissal of the indictments, six more indictments, a jury trial and a federal investigation by a U.S. attorney. The first indictment had to be dismissed when it was revealed that a black grand juror had conducted his own investigation, including collecting press stories about the case, and presented his conclusions to the other jurors.
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Allegations of misconduct filled the newspapers—against the officers, the prosecutors and the medical examiner. And, as always seemed to happen in cases of alleged police racism, the family demanded a special prosecutor to investigate, because, you see, the regular criminal justice system could not be trusted.

There were multiple investigations that went on for years and years—by the police, the U.S. attorney’s office, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state’s Board of Professional Medical Conduct, and Board of Regents.
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And of course, the officers were criminally prosecuted. But no one was ever found guilty of any misconduct in the Stewart case. Except, arguably, Michael Stewart, whose vandalizing of the subway meant the taxpayers had to fund all these pointless investigations, not to mention the subway cleaning. Sorry, New York, no ice skating rink for you because Michael Stewart had to scrawl graffiti on a subway wall.

The autopsy in the case became a political football with the city’s medical examiner, Dr. Elliot M. Gross, continuously altering his report as the screams of racism got louder.

His first report, after a six-hour examination in full view of two doctors hired by the Stewart family—who would later sue the city for $40 million in the case—concluded that the suspect had died of cardiac arrest, unrelated to his injuries.

This elicited the usual reaction, with Stewart’s family accusing Dr. Gross of “some sort of collusion” with the transit police and calling his report a lie and cover-up.

So Dr. Gross revised his findings to say a spinal cord injury caused Stewart’s death—a finding that was contradicted by a mayoral commission investigating Dr. Gross for misconduct, which concluded that the spinal cord injury had not caused Stewart’s death.
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A second medical examiner performed a follow-up examination and confirmed Dr. Gross’s original conclusion—that Stewart had died of cardiac arrest. Although the family accused the police of strangling Stewart, the reviewing doctor expressly found that the “tissues of the neck fail to disclose any evidence of trauma such as might be produced by strangulation.”

Still later, Dr. Gross
again
revised his findings to say Stewart’s injuries could have come from a beating.

Perhaps being accused of racism led Dr. Gross to produce more accurate reports. But the threat of being labeled a racist, becoming a social pariah, detested by all of humankind, has also been known to cause people to bend the truth.
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In order to prosecute the officers for manslaughter, the district attorney’s office had to concoct a new theory of legal liability, allowing cops to be guilty of manslaughter simply for failing to protect suspects in their custody from harm.

In the middle of the investigation, the
Times
had weighed in with an editorial saying the city owed the public “rigorous prosecution of the Stewart case.”
¹⁶
The police were never considered part of this “public” that was owed.

In what other criminal cases does the
Times
call for “rigorous prosecution”? It didn’t call for “rigorous prosecution” in the case of the Central Park jogger brutalized and left for dead by a group of teenaged thugs. The
Times
didn’t call for the “rigorous prosecution” of Jerry Sandusky. It certainly didn’t call for the “rigorous prosecution” of Mike Nifong, the crazed prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse case, who tried to put innocent men in prison. Rigorous prosecution was only important when the police were on trial for allegedly beating a black criminal resisting arrest.

After a five-month trial—with lots of protests and audience participation—the jury acquitted all six officers. In a somber editorial on the verdict, the
Times
assumed that
some
officers had beaten Stewart, but the jurors couldn’t decide which ones. Thus, the
Times
ruefully remarked that witnesses had testified that “they saw police officers beat and kick Mr. Stewart, but they were unable to identify specific officers.”
¹⁷

Except that wasn’t why the jury acquitted the officers. As two jurors patiently explained to
Times
editors a few weeks later, they didn’t believe any officers beat Stewart. Testimony from witnesses claiming to have seen Stewart being beaten, they said, was “inconsistent,” “uncertain” and “vague.”
¹⁸

Suspiciously missing from the extensive media coverage of the Stewart case were the usual homey details about the victim—his family’s recollections of him, his passions, how he loved school and had a “ready smile”—the “ready smile” detail was always when you knew the
Times
was writing about a dangerous sociopath.

Stewart’s entire life was a blank slate, with the media identifying him exclusively as an “artist” and “model,” and the police calling him a “violent psycho.” However, one detail accidentally slipped out after the trial, when the
Times
mentioned that the jurors had heard “a reference to an outstanding warrant for Mr. Stewart’s arrest.”
¹⁹

Liberals didn’t know who Michael Stewart was and they didn’t care—until his death allowed them to engage in their usual breast-beating about racism. Stewart is now memorialized in a Lou Reed song and a Keith Haring painting: a victim of police racism. Haring’s painting is titled, “Michael Stewart—USA for Africa.” For all we know, Stewart had never heard of Africa.

LARRY DAVIS—1987

A few years later, a black criminal, Larry Davis, killed four drug dealers in the South Bronx and one in Manhattan to steal their drugs. When the police came to arrest him, he shot six of them. For firing at uniformed police officers, the
Times
cheerfully reported, Davis became a folk hero in large parts of the black community. Davis eluded the police for seventeen days, and when he was finally led away, residents of the Bronx housing project where he was caught leaned out their windows, chanting “Lar-ry! Lar-ry!”
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