What Hillary Clinton won't say

Rudy Giuliani has dramatically reduced the number of shots fired by police at civilians in New York, as well as the number of people killed by anyone there.

By David Horowitz

Apr 3, 2000 | This year, Democrats are demonstrating a talent for political fiction exceeding even the writers of "The West Wing." Casting Al Gore as a campaign-finance reformer is one example. Posing as champions of fiscal discipline is another. Of course, Democratic spin artists benefit from the support of a shamelessly partisan journalistic fraternity that helps make their fictions credible. (For an example, look no further than the media silence surrounding Gore's friend, Maria Hsia.)

But to really appreciate the Democrats' literary license one has to go to the Big Apple, where Hillary Clinton and her race-baiting collaborators the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have contrived a political melodrama to provide the emotional backdrop for the lynching of a socially liberal mayor. For seven years, Rudy Giuliani has crusaded to increase the safety and well-being of New Yorkers, and especially of inner-city minorities. But in the past few months the Sharptonite Democrats have managed to cast Giuliani as a latter-day Bull Connor -- a Yankee redneck deploying a thin blue line of racist thugs against defenseless communities of color.

The most recent episode in this ugly charade was kicked off by the left's predictable reaction to the accidental (and statistically rare) shooting of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed man of Haitian descent. A week earlier, the physically imposing Dorismond had beaten his ex-girlfriend so badly she had called the police.

According to witnesses, Dorismond -- who had been previously arrested for drug purchases -- attacked an undercover squad of New York police officers as they were attempting to conduct a sting operation against drug dealers in a high crime Manhattan neighborhood. Dorismond was shot by a Hispanic officer named Anthony Vasquez, who reacted out of fear for the life of a fellow officer under attack. Tragically, Dorismond died from his wounds.

Dramatically speaking, on the other hand, a dead man was even more useful to the lynch mob. The image of a young life lost enabled agitators to work the Haitian community into a frenzy of grief, paranoia and revenge.

At a protest meeting, Harlem religious leader and all-seasons incendiary, the Rev. Calvin Butts, ranted, "White man go to hell," even though all the cops involved in the killing were Hispanic. Sharpton incited people to shut down the city to gain "Justice for Patrick" and helped to turn his funeral into an anti-police riot. And Jackson descended on New York to call the shooting a murder and to compare it to the racist killings of nonviolent civil rights workers in the 1960s. (Recently, Jackson seems to be on a perverse mission to discredit every last memory of the civil rights movement.)

The press, of course, did not point out that Jackson was condemning the accused officer in advance of seeing the evidence in the case. Jackson was with his new friend, lifelong thug, twice-convicted (and never acquitted), triple-murderer Rubin Carter. Carter of course is the subject of a recent Hollywood film falsely exonerating him and maliciously defaming a white police officer who, it alleges, pursued Carter from childhood on just because he was black.

Moving the scenery behind the Big Apple stage, of course, were Hillary and Bill, America's dysfunctional progressive couple. While lending her support to the lynchers, Hillary was careful to defer to Jackson in prosecuting the accused. She did not repeat her mistake in the recent case of Amadou Diallo, whose shooting death she had labeled murder before a jury was able to deliver its verdict exonerating the officers of any criminal intention or act. Not that the verdict caused Mrs. Clinton the slightest qualm of conscience or the least second thought. Not a word of disapproval has escaped her lips about Sharpton's outrageous crusade for a federal trial of the acquitted officers over the same incident.

If anyone is a racist Javert in these cases, it has to be Mrs. Clinton's political ally Sharpton, who for 10 years harassed innocent Steven Pagones with the malicious falsehoods of Tawana Brawley. Now Sharpton Democrats have upped the ante in public outrages by calling for the Justice Department to investigate the New York Police Department. If the attorney general agrees, this will dramatize and validate their insane view that Republican mayors and Hispanic policemen are homicidal racists engaged in a conspiracy to kill innocent blacks during an election year, driving African-Americans even deeper into the Mrs. Clinton-Gore camp.

What about the facts? Is there a "liberal" left in America who even cares about the facts? I'm not referring, of course, to the facts in the Dorismond case, because nobody except those who were present or who have read the sealed eyewitness accounts really knows about those. Honesty would require everyone else to admit that they are proceeding from an ideological predisposition or from instinct based on prior experience. So, let's look at those facts.

In 1993, the last year that David Dinkins was mayor of New York, there were 212 intentional police shootings of civilians (many of them African-Americans). This compares to only 73 shootings by the Giuliani police force in the past year. In 1991, during Dinkins' reign, there were 41 fatalities resulting from police shootings. In 1999, under Giuliani there were only 11. Yet at no time during Dinkins' reign, did the socially conscious demand that the Justice Department step in to end the epidemic of "police brutality" and/or incompetence of the Dinkins administration. There has been no mention of this hypocrisy in the press. Might this be because Dinkins is a Democrat, a leftist and black?

Next Page: Rudy's cut the shots fired at civilians by 57 percent

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