by Bob Herbert
The anger in the neighborhoods is not being heard. There was a
flurry of well-publicized protests after the Diallo shooting but that's
over. The cops continue to do what they want, much of it lousy. The
Mayor says we're not as bad as some places, which is a comfort, I
guess. A man who beats his wife is not as bad as one who kills her.

This time the black person hauled away and degraded by the police for
no good reason was Alton Fitzgerald White, a star of the Broadway hit
"Ragtime." Mr. White, who is 35, was standing in the vestibule of his
apartment building in Washington Heights when the police arrived. He
opened the door to hold it for them, thinking they were there to help
someone in distress. As he's always been a law-abiding individual, he
never imagined they would arrest him and drag him away like so much
garbage.

But that's what they did. It seems a couple of Hispanic guys in the
building's lobby had some cocaine. And that's reason enough in the
cowboy logic of the police to arrest any black men who are nearby. In
this case there were three of them. One was Mr. White.

I asked a spokeswoman for Police Commissioner Howard Safir if it
made sense to arrest everyone in the lobby before police really knew
what was going on. She said: "Yes. Until you sort it out."

Only the naïve think you actually have to be involved in a crime before
the police bust you in New York. Or shoot you. Mr. White tried to
explain that he had done nothing wrong, that he lived in the building.
Neighbors tried to tell the officers they were making a mistake, that Mr.
White was a straight arrow, a good and talented man, an actor in a
starring role on Broadway.

To the cops he was a "male black," and thus a perpetual suspect.
Nothing more. There are no heights he can climb that will raise him above
suspicion.

Instead of being on stage when the curtain went up for the evening
performance of "Ragtime" on July 16, Mr. White was caged like an
animal at the 33d Precinct station house on Amsterdam Avenue. He told
The Times's Dinitia Smith that he found himself weeping from the
humiliation.

Later the cops would apologize. Mr. White was innocent after all. So
were the other black men who were arrested. A kilo of cocaine was
seized in the lobby, but Mr. White had nothing to do with it. It was
unfortunate that he was strip-searched and traumatized, and that he
missed several performances. But, hey, it was an honest mistake. It's not
like what happened to Abner Louima, or Amadou Diallo. If you think
about it, Mr. White should consider himself lucky. After all, he wasn't
brutalized. He's still in one piece. He's still alive. And it certainly was
reasonable to arrest him. After all, even he admits he's black.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his top police officials apparently do not
realize -- or do not care -- that the department's relentless and
indiscriminate attack on New Yorkers who are not white is both wrong
and dangerous. People in black and Latino neighborhoods are being
stopped and searched by the tens of thousands.

Officials at Rice High School, the only Catholic high school in Harlem,
told The Times in March that one of their teachers, Brother Tyrone
Davis, had become reluctant to leave work without his religious collar
because he had grown so tired of being stopped by the police. Students
at Rice High who are engaged in no wrongdoing are frequently stopped
and frisked.

Why this is not a larger news story I don't know. An enormous segment
of the city's population is being subjected to routine humiliation by the
police. But unless a cop takes a cylinder and shoves it deep into
someone's rectum, or unloads an insane volley of bullets into an innocent
man, it is not considered a big story.

It is as if the reporters and editors and television news directors in this
town were unable to grasp the significance of what the police are doing.
And perhaps that is because so many in the media are as guilty as the
police of promoting stereotypes and denying the humanity of certain
people.

Damarr McBean, a 15-year-old honors student at Rice High, said of his
encounters with the police: "It just makes you feel low, like you don't
stand for anything. You just feel violated."