Clergymen, union officials, City Council members and other prominent figures volunteered for arrest. Former Mayor Koch, who presided over such police atrocities as the shotgun killing of Eleanor Bumpurs, had volunteered to go to jail, before he was sidelined with an illness. These cosmetic changes cannot alter the underlying causes of the police brutality which are inextricably bound up with the intense social polarization which has taken place in the city. New York has seen the greatest accumulation of wealth in history, even as the great majority of the city's population, increasingly fed by immigration from every part of the world, remains struggling with low-wage jobs and poverty. The Giuliani administration has carried out a policy that is principally aimed at meeting the needs of the Wall Street finance houses and corporate headquarters that dominate the city's economic and political life, while guaranteeing the security of a layer of millionaires and billionaires that occupies some of the world's most expensive real estate within only a short distance of areas of intense poverty.
Police brutality is part and parcel of the onslaught on the poor.
As long as these economic and social conditions exist, the tactical changes will not alter the reality of police abuse and brutality for the working class. The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail .