The Voice's Yellow Journalism

But in such a charged atmosphere, the Mayor's accusers in the media should be careful of their own inflammatory rhetoric. A new low in simpleminded editorial grandstanding was reached last week by, not surprisingly, the Village Voice, in its front-page editorial. Ostensibly a call for the resignation of Howard Safir, it was a cynical excuse to milk some easy "outrage" from kneejerk readers, and an ugly exercise in yellow journalism.

The untruths began in the first sentence: "With another black guy deposited in the gutter, courtesy of New York's spiraling blue-on-black crime rate..." The copy went on to call the NYPD "Glock crazy" and "a department packed with trigger-happy pistoleros," offer the canard that Giuliani "gets his jollies from a spot of racial unrest," and so on.

NYPD officers have killed four unarmed black men in the last 13 months, and have used excessive force on others, like Abner Louima. These are clear facts, of concern to everyone from Amnesty International to the man in the street?everyone, it seems, but the Mayor and Commissioner Safir. But by what possible statistical analysis did the Voice come up with a "spiraling blue-on-black crime rate"? A few spectacular and troubling cases notwithstanding, all the statistics available indicate that police shootings, fatal and nonfatal, have decreased significantly in New York City in recent years, and that the rates here are far below those in other major cities, including L.A., Philadelphia, Miami and Atlanta. As the Daily News noted in a well-reasoned editorial this Sunday, "There were 41 fatal police shootings in 1990, compared with 11 last year. That's the lowest incidence since records have been kept." Even Amnesty International concedes as much. But it's easier for the Voice and others in the media, like Newsday pundit Ellis Henican, to move copies by pandering to dangerous racial hysteria.

"Blue-on-black crime" is a misleading image in other ways. The crucial problem in the Dorismond killing, as in many cases of cops tangling with citizens in questionable circumstances, is precisely that Officer Vasquez and his colleagues were not in blue; had they been identifiable as police officers, the confrontation wouldn't have occurred as it did. The case screams for a serious review of the department's undercover policies.

It's also interesting that Officer Vasquez was not mentioned by name in that Voice editorial, for the obvious reason that it's the wrong kind of name: a cop with a Latino name?a person "of color," the Voice would say under any other circumstances?ruins the traditional picture of racist white cops murdering innocent black citizens. Easier to ignore the Latino cop who did the shooting and shift your focus to his painfully white bosses. Ah, that's it. Back on familiar high ground.