Ferrer never flip-flopped
NY Daily news
Juan Gonzalez
April 13, 2005

Here we go again.

A new mayoral race has barely gotten into gear and already the political opportunists in this town and some pygmies in the press are doing all they can to inject racial division and confusion into the campaign.

The target this time, just as he was in 2001, is Fernando Ferrer.

Ferrer has been the Democratic front-runner in the polls from the start. Those polls indicate he has the best shot to unseat Mayor Bloomberg and bring an end to 12 years of Republican rule in City Hall.

Leaders of the pack expect a bull's-eye on their back.

But for a month now, Ferrer has been peppered almost nonstop with questions about just one issue - his stance on the infamous 41-bullet police killing of Amadou Diallo in 1999.

We've all heard the charge that he supposedly flip-flopped. This allegation stems from a March 15 speech he made before a group of police sergeants. He told them the killing of Diallo was not a crime.

He also said that "what gave rise to that incident was bad policy, bad training, bad decision-making."

Those words, his critics claim, contradict his words and actions back in 1999, when he was arrested in mass protests outside Police Headquarters following Diallo's killing.

But my examination of Ferrer's words and actions back then and now shows just the opposite. He has been remarkably consistent on the Diallo tragedy.

He never called the shooting of Diallo a crime in 1999. He repeatedly talked about terrible management policies by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir as creating the conditions for inexcusable incidents like the Diallo shooting.

He told the sergeants the same thing I recall him telling me in a 1999 interview. This was shortly after the four cops who shot Diallo were indicted for murder by Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson. He said it wasn't appropriate for him, as a public official, to comment on a matter being decided in a courtroom.

As for the protests after Diallo's death, when he and then-state Controller Carl McCall were arrested, Ferrer said he was trying to send a message to Giuliani that NYPD policy had to change. He was tired of all the civilian complaints piling up in his office about police abuse, he said. Complaints that City Hall was not addressing.

After the protests at Police Headquarters led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, a Justice Department investigation of the NYPD revealed that three out of every four cops found guilty of misconduct by the Civilian Complaint Review Board had never been disciplined during the Safir years.

Sure, there were many in this town, including myself, who felt the Diallo shooting was so unjustified it warranted a murder indictment of the cops involved.

But Ferrer was never one of them. He never called for an indictment of the cops.

He always stressed that he was not attacking the city's many good cops. He had his eye on a City Hall run even then.

You can disagree with his views, but smearing him as inconsistent is dead wrong.

More importantly, those who have relentlessly attacked Ferrer the past few weeks have failed to examine the record of the other mayoral candidates on the same issue.

Take Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields.

Her office in the Municipal Building overlooks 1 Police Plaza. While hundreds of New Yorkers including Ferrer were arrested each day outside her window, Fields stayed in her office, above the fray.

Worse, she defended Giuliani and Safir.

In a press conference on Feb. 10, 1999, Fields said: "A tragic event like the shooting of Amadou Diallo is not the fault of the mayor or the police commissioner, and I am not here to cast blame." She even referred to the Diallo shooting as an "isolated tragedy."

During the next six years, she never called the Diallo incident a crime.

As for City Council President Gifford Miller and Rep. Anthony Weiner, the other Democratic mayoral hopefuls, neither was arrested in any Diallo protests. Miller was part of the press conference where Fields made her milquetoast remarks.

Then there's Bloomberg. He has no record to examine other that his four years in City Hall.

So Ferrer, the mayoral candidate with the most consistent record of standing up against policies that lead to police abuse, gets tarred and feathered over the Diallo case.

It's tough being a front-runner.

Originally published on April 13, 2005