Giuliani Time: Urban Policing and Brooklyn South (From Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City, P 85-103, 2001, Andrea McArdle and Tanya Erzen, eds. -- See NCJ-188321)

• NCJ Number: 188324
• Author(s): Sasha Torres
• Date Published: 2001
• Length: 19 pages
• Sale Source: New York University Press
• Publication Format: Book (Softbound)
• Publication Type: Legislation/Policy Analysis
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This essay examines collisions between mass-mediated representation of police work and the history of police brutality in black communities, particularly how such collisions shape politics and daily life in contemporary American cities; the focus is on the 1997 police assault on Abner Louima in Brooklyn's 70th Precinct house and the subsequent premiere of a new police television drama called "Brooklyn South."

Abstract

In public discourse, the assault on Abner Louima was immediately linked to the period of Rudolph Giuliani's administration. Immediately after the attack, Louima claimed that his assailant had admonished him during the beating to respect the police because "this is Giuliani time, not Dinkins time." Although Louima later recanted this claim, the phrase "Giuliani Time" has persisted as a descriptor of the meeting point of politics and daily life during the city's current "boom." The temporal proximity of the premiere of "Brooklyn South" to the attack on Louima suggests that the program's narratives may have served as a way in which viewers processed, both psychically and politically, the assault and its aftershocks. The text of "Brooklyn South" portrayed Louima (or more precisely, the Louima-function, the black man assaulted by police) as a homicidal maniac, and Brooklyn police officers as generally presenting a unified front against police abuse. Such processing of the social through the representational tend to contain the disruptive challenges to police and mayoral authority posed by the savagery of the officers involved. More generally, any extended consideration of contemporary policing must take the cop show into account as a key ideological technology in the production of disciplined, lawful subjects whose primary point of entry into narratives about crime will be their identification with the police. This essay demonstrates how all of the elements of "Brooklyn South's" text--its narrative structure, its camera work and editing, its use of sound--are finely calibrated to encourage this identification. 42 notes