Both of these reputed reports are patently false. If it is true that 70th Precinct police made them, their rationale was hatched in a feverish scramble to disassociate themselves from the severe damages done to both their arrested victim's colon and bladder after they'd raped him with a toilet plunger for failing to "properly" bow to their "authority."

Last Saturday night Abner Louima had gone to a favorite Haitian hangout where one of his favorite bands was playing. In the early hours of the morning a scuffle outside the bar between two persons found Louima attempting to put a stop to the fight. When police arrived they arrested him in the melee and took him to the 70th Precinct where, in the station's bathroom, the toilet plunger was jammed into his anus.

Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, running for re-election, was immediately accused by his political opponents and by newspaper columnists for having allowed a favorable climate for police brutality to grow because of his repeated coddling of the city's "finest". Gay activists in New York City have been complaining for more than a year that gay-related entrapment arrests have mushroomed dramatically, with a turnback to police behavior characteristic of the pre-Stonewall era.

Guiliani has moved swiftly to do political damage control, and flanked by his police commissioner he has been assuring the city that the offending officers in the 70th Precinct will be brought to justice. Several "cracks in the blue wall of silence", a reference to police unwillingness to turn evidence against fellow officers, have appeared.

Such late action on the mayor's part, however, is suspect as a political ploy and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes that the city and the mayor are living in denial about the whole issue of police brutality. While it is true that crime rates have dropped in the Big Apple, it is also true, as Herbert explains, that miscarriages of justice have--prior to the high profile Louima case, retained low-profile status.

"Each time I hear that the attack on Abner Louima was an aberration," writes Herbert August 21, "I think of Carlton Brown, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after officers drove his head like a battering ram into the bulletproof glass doors at the entrance to Brooklyn's 63rd Precinct station house. I think of Lebert Folkes, who had to have a plate inserted into his head to hold his eyeball in place after he was shot in the face at point-blank range for no apparent reason. I think of the parents of young people killed by brutal officers, the sense of utter desolation that I've seen in the faces and the voices of mothers and fathers who haven't yet learned to speak of the children in the past tense. I think of the individuals I have interviewed who no longer speak as clearly, or think as sharply, or walk as well as they did before encountering a sadistic, brutal cop. Individuals who had done nothing wrong."