Razzle Dazzle
Ranting in Black and White

By RICHARD STEIER

When a member of his staff suggested a fellow City Councilman should be assassinated, Charles Barron quipped that he might give her a raise. When someone on a Web site popular among cops proposed bumping off Mr. Barron, the Councilman hollered copper.

Leroy Comrie, the Council's Deputy Majority Leader, was the target of the first assassination comment, which was made by Councilman Barron's Chief of Staff, Viola Plummer, after Mr. Comrie abstained from voting on a resolution that would have allowed a street to be named after Sonny Carson, the late black activist and racial arsonist.

Ms. Plummer, who lives in Queens, vowed to thwart Mr. Comrie's ambition to be President of the borough, even "if it takes an assassination of his ass."

An anonymous poster on NYPD Rant who identified himself as MidNightTrooper countered by stating of Mr. Barron, "Someone needs to put a bullet in that guy's head and be done with it."

An Unusual Supplicant

When Mr. Barron learned of the posting and a second, similar one, which were later removed from the site, he called on Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to root out these "sick, racist individuals."

AN UNLIKELY BOND: City Council Member Charles Barron (left) has called for the firing of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in the past, but more recently he turned to the Commissioner for help after a posting on a Web site popular among cops that could be construed as threatening his life. The anonymous poster was responding to a comment by Mr. Barron's Chief of Staff that she would 'assassinate' another Councilman before letting him become Queens Borough President.

Given Mr. Barron's well-known distrust of the police, and his response when Mr. Comrie called for Ms. Plummer to be fired that instead he might give her a raise for being righteously outspoken, the sincerity of his request left something to the imagination. That was particularly true given Mr. Barron's angry denunciation less than a week earlier of those who had denied a memorial to Mr. Carson, who strutted his own racism as if it were a prize bulldog.

The Brooklyn Councilman and some of the posters on NYPD Rant share both a penchant for incendiary remarks and a sense of outrage when anyone calls them on their incivility. They remind us of why, though it doesn't make for splashy media coverage, moderation of both thought and rhetoric is a civic virtue in a place like New York.

The Rant, as can be deduced by its name, is a place designed for cops to vent. The postings found there cover topics ranging from advice on getting a good disability lawyer to the latest episode of "The Sopranos," as well as the more bread-and-butter issues that cops gossip about, like their unresolved contract and the state of the NYPD.

Its founder, Ed Polstein, was fired by the NYPD last year and claims in a civil suit that it was because he created the site as a forum for vociferous criticism of Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly, whom he had referred to as "Popeye."

City officials have denied that claim, saying that his ouster was spurred primarily by his having brought C-4 explosives, a pipe bomb and other devices into Police Headquarters in what he said was intended as an unauthorized demonstration of security problems in the building. He also was charged with using the NYPD logo on the Web site without permission.

Image of 'A Cauldron of Bigots'

While they insist he was not terminated for the content on the site, Assistant Corporation Counsel Alan Schlesinger contended in the city's written response to the suit that Mr. Polstein improperly used NYPD Rant to offer an "orgy of bigoted and reckless postings ... The NYPD need not ignore speech that risks the department's mission by presenting the NYPD as a cauldron of bigots."

Reading between the lines, if Mr. Polstein didn't know enough to be embarrassed by postings with headings like "Savages," the NYPD certainly did.

At the other end of the spectrum in this square-off between Mr. Barron and The Rant, no one in positions of power has been willing to say enough is enough to the Councilman who loves stirring up racial tension.

Mr. Barron is a former Black Panther who favors the Nehru jackets most associated with former Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver. (Perhaps it's my own contrarian nature, but his dress and style reminds me more of the James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld as played by Charles Gray, who accessorized his Nehrus with a cigarette holder and the same kind of purring malevolence Mr. Barron emits much of the time.) The soft-spoken delivery of his bile sometimes camouflages its nastiness, but that was not the case when it became clear two weeks ago that the push to get part of Gates Ave. in Brooklyn named in memory of Mr. Carson was headed to its just reward at the Council.

Addressing Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Mr. Barron accused her of having "brought us to the point of divide that the City Council has never experienced" and said she was a far more polarizing individual than Mr. Carson had been until his death five years ago.

Particularly ironic was when he excoriated her by saying, "You don't even know Sonny Carson." Judging by Mr. Barron's assessment of their abilities to divide New Yorkers, he didn't appear to know Mr. Carson very well either.

Helped Torpedo Dinkins

The late firebrand's starring roles in fanning racial flames during both the Korean boycott and the Crown Heights riots - and then-Mayor David Dinkins's failure to act strongly in response - are arguably the biggest reason New York's first black Mayor saw his support among white voters slip sharply enough to deny him a second term.

Thrusting his finger in Ms. Quinn's direction, Mr. Barron declared, with the authority of a man who knows the territory, "What you did was despicable."

People, meaning other elected officials and much of the news media, tend to turn the other cheek when it comes to Mr. Barron. It is why he can employ as his Chief of Staff Ms. Plummer, an aging radical who in 1984 was charged - she was later found guilty on a reduced count - with attempting to spring from prison a couple of the men who were convicted in the murders of two cops and a security guard during a 1981 robbery of a Brink's truck in Nyack.

It is also why he can be seriously discussed as a possible candidate for Brooklyn Borough President in 2009 despite his statement five years ago that sometimes he got so frustrated that "I just want to go up to the closest white person and say, 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing,' and then slap him, just for my mental health.'''

Unequal Opportunity

Imagine a white elected official in the city saying he sometimes had the impulse to smack someone of another color to improve his own outlook on life. It might not render him politically dead, but he'd have to fight his way through an onslaught of media and official vilification to keep his job.

It is as if because he doesn't aspire to be respectable, Mr. Barron doesn't need to live up to the standards of responsibility that are in place for other officials. The problem with the establishment taking the attitude of, 'Just ignore him, maybe he'll go away,''' is that he doesn't, and his conduct provides a rationalization for all those at the other end of the racial spectrum to behave with similar lack of decorum.

More than a few of them can be found on The Rant.

There is no clear delineation of which posters are current city cops, which are retired or mustered out of the NYPD, and which have no connection to the force. The city and the Police Department, judging by the response to Mr. Polstein's lawsuit, are clearly uncomfortable about the prospect that some of the more noxious posters either are active cops or that this is the impression that visitors to the site will get.

Kelly's 'Savage' Worry

What has to be particularly distressing to Mr. Kelly are the strings based on the proposition "You're a savage if ..." that include one poster's response, "are you talking about the savages on the street? or the savages we have to work with everyday?"

The casual racism shows up in postings on everything from the Puerto Rican Day Parade to Gary Sheffield's views on why there are far more Latinos than blacks in Major League Baseball.

Mr. Polstein does not exercise much of a filter in deciding what material is simply unfit for the Web site. The speedy deletion of the threats to Mr. Barron's life might be presumed to have occurred on the advice of his attorney, Jeffrey Goldberg (who was unwilling to comment on that last week), since the irresponsibility of putting it out there could blow to smithereens any legitimate free-speech case Mr. Polstein may have against the department.

The lack of discretion that is otherwise exercised could be seen in a posting a few weeks ago of the make of Mr. Barron's car and its license-plate number.

One poster who identified himself as a cop tried to act as a voice of reason by pointing out how furious police officers are - justifiably - when information about their cars or home addresses is circulated, because it leaves them vulnerable to attacks by criminals. As much as he disliked Mr. Barron, he said, it was wrong to put this kind of information about his car on the site.

Word to the Unwise

His posting triggered dozens of responses, most of which went beyond slamming the Councilman to insult and belittle the poster for trying to confuse the issue by invoking the Golden Rule. It was prime evidence of the Us vs. Them mentality that critics accuse many cops of having, and the posters didn't seem to have a clue about it.

A similar kind of bunker mentality turned up in a string last month regarding the settlement of a civil suit by the family of Timothy Stansbury, the teenager who was fatally shot three years ago by Police Officer Richard Neri as he came through the roof door of a Brooklyn housing project.

Although Commissioner Kelly initially stated that there appeared to be no justification for the shooting, Officer Neri escaped indictment by a grand jury when he convinced its members that he had fired reflexively when Mr. Stansbury startled him.

Several posters on The Rant suggested the teenager had gotten what he deserved; that he had been trespassing on the project roof and may have been planning to commit another crime as well.

It would be easy to dismiss such sentiments as not representative of most cops, except that after Mr. Neri returned to work, the officers in his unit elected him their Patrolmen's Benevolent Association delegate. That may have been intended as payback to Commissioner Kelly for leaving him hanging out to dry immediately after the shooting. Whatever the intent, however, the net effect was a slap in the face to the Stansbury family and to those who believe cops are indifferent or worse to young black men. It also cheapened what is supposed to be a leadership job: what exactly had Officer Neri done to warrant his serving as a union delegate?

Gives Cover to Racists

The Rant allows racist posters to hide behind their anonymity, and to blend in with those who raise legitimate and provocative issues, often with intelligence or humor. Indulging the vituperation offers someone like Mr. Barron, who has carried paranoia about the police forward from the 1960s, reason to believe that he is justified in doing so, even as his own posturing reinforces the belief of some cops that they won't be judged fairly by the minority community.

In a perverse way, they feed off each other by perpetuating stereotypes and pumping up the box office for the poison they're exhibiting.

It winds up being a distraction from the far greater complexities of the relationship between the NYPD and city residents. It also obscures the event that makes most people reluctant to dismiss politically inspired death threats as woof-talking: the 2003 assassination of Brooklyn Council Member James Davis, a former cop, by a deranged political rival.