Beware of Rudolph

Pretty Lady did not live in NYC during the Giuliani years. Thus, when the Angry Atheist went off on one of his frequent diatribes about fascism and harassment and police officers, she listened politely but skeptically. After all, she had read The Tipping Point.

But Pretty Lady has been a Cintra Wilson fan since the days of "Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain," and she is much more inclined to trust dear Cintra's psychological perspicacity than that of the A.A. And Cintra's informed dismemberment of Rudy's temperamental irregularities is comprehensive and chilling.

Giuliani, having destroyed what might have been the best management team in NYPD history, had to start from scratch. Bratton's successors continued using the tactics of the men Rudy had canned, but twisted and distorted them. Giuliani and Safir, in trying to one-up the strategic balance of the Bratton team's approach to law enforcement, opted to jack up the "enforcement" and not pay so much attention to the "law."

Safir's NYPD beefed up the Street Crime Unit, a corps of hyper-macho officers once described by the Village Voice's Nat Hentoff as "a rogue police operation whose members make Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi." They were given leeway to enact "stop-and-frisks" of ordinary citizens -- supposedly to discourage them from carrying guns. While Safir's office implemented easier arrestee processing methods, New York's nonwhite citizens became increasingly alarmed by a police force they perceived as hostile, overzealous and racist. Go figure: members of the Street Crime Unit, Hentoff reported, delighted in wearing T-shirts emblazoned with such intimidating slogans as "We Own the Night!" and the Hemingway quote, "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it never care for anything else."

In two years, the Street Crime Unit officially reported 40,000 stop-and-frisk confrontations, but only 9,500 of those searched were arrested. In a radio interview, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was alarmed enough by these stats to tell WNYC's Brian Lehrer: "I've spoken to many officers who say they do not fill out the required forms for every stop-and-frisk. They may fill out one in five or one in 10. We may have several hundred thousands of these police actions without arrests."

Given the excesses of our current administration with regards to erosion of basic civil liberties, hubris, fibbing, and general authoritarian expansionism, it does not seem to Pretty Lady that this country needs to err upon the side of 'more of the same.' The Angry Atheist may have been paranoid, but he was not imperceptive or unintelligent. Pretty Lady is rarely political, but she is convinced. Whatever your affiliations, opinions, views of any kind--do not vote for Rudy.