by David N. Dinkins

About the author: David N. Dinkins was the mayor of New York City from 1990 to 1994. In the following viewpoint, Dinkins refers to Rudolph Giuliani, who succeeded Dinkins as mayor of New York City in 1994 and was reelected in 1997.

The horrific brutalization of Abner Louima [by police officers in the New York Police Department in August 1997], and the silence of officers and supervisors during and immediately after the incident, has created public outrage, and rightly so. Yet police violence, which has resulted in the severe injury or death of individuals who have not even been charged with a crime, takes place in our city with disturbing regularity—and the silence surrounding these incidents reaches to the highest level of city government. Tragically, the mayor [Rudolph Giuliani] has failed to pay attention—or...