Now that the immediate media hoopla over actor Danny Glover’s bias complaint against a New York City cabdriver has subsided, it’s worth taking a look back at the curious way in which the entire incident played out.
It’s difficult not to wonder whether the usual cast of characters didn’t in fact capitalize on a legitimate social issue for the sole purpose of scoring political points against Mayor Giuliani. Because it turns out that the mayor did precisely what those who rushed to support Danny Glover demanded — and then found himself criticized harshly for doing so.
In the wake of Glover’s well-publicized press conference unveiling the bias complaint, local black leaders demanded that the city begin cracking down on cabbies who refused to pick up black passengers. Unlike Glover and his lawyer, Randolph Scott-McLaughlin (a highly regarded protégé of William Kunstler), they used specific language: They dared Rudy Giuliani to behave like Rudy Giuliani.
“It’s another form of racial profiling and we want it to stop,” said Al Sharpton. “The mayor has the rhetoric, but where are the results?”
Eric Adams, the often incendiary head of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, demanded more aggressive police enforcement against cab drivers and specifically called on “African-American and Latino officers to take the lead” by issuing summonses.
Former Mayor David Dinkins, who somehow never managed to make the issue a major priority during his four years in office, taunted the mayor to react as vigorously as had on other quality-of-life problems: “The mayor has often mounted campaigns against jaywalking, double-parking and other issues,” Dinkins said. “They should do something like that with regard to the cabbies who break the law in this way.”
Adams’ similar challenge: “We believe the Giuliani administration has been successful in stamping out squeegee men and other types of crime, but has ignored this problem.”
So what happened? The mayor responded in exactly the same fashion as he has against jaywalkers, squeegee men and DWI offenses: He announced a massive police crackdown aimed at letting cabdrivers know that they discriminate against passengers at their own peril; that if they pick and choose their fares on the basis of ethnicity, there will be dire consequences if they’re caught.
Lo and behold, those who’d been demanding that Giuliani react in just such a way suddenly found his approach not only unacceptable but, yes, racist. It seems that no one wanted those guilty of discrimination to be punished — they wanted the white power structure (“the underlying racism”) to be sanctioned. Which is why Scott-McLaughlin likened the mayor’s crackdown to “a Band-Aid on cancer” and Sharpton has vowed to file a class-action lawsuit against the Taxi and Limousine Commission.
But it turns out that the TLC had not been ignoring the issue until Danny Glover came along. On the contrary, the agency for years had launched aggressive undercover operations to test drivers’ willingness to pick up black passengers: In 1996, for example, its Operation Refusal tested 3,700 drivers and issued summonses against 399, with penalties ranging from fines of up to $500 with possible 30-day license suspensions to outright license revocation.
Separately, the city received 2,317 service-refusal complaints between July 1998 and last June — but nearly three-quarters of those who filed an initial action refused to follow up by actually appearing at disciplinary hearings and testifying. As a result, most charges were dropped, although 320 drivers were convicted last year.
So what’s to be done about this very real and legitimate problem?
Part of the dilemma is that we’re really not talking about classic racism here. Cabdrivers (more than 80 percent of whom are nonwhite) are not refusing blacks because they don’t want them in their taxis. These drivers are mostly happy to take any legitimate fare they can get.
The discrimination involved here is mostly about money. Until recently, it involved fear of crime; now it involves both a fear of being stiffed on an expensive fare and the desire to stay in more well-to-do neighborhoods, where a quick turnover in fares in guaranteed.
Through a combination of personal experiences and shared cabby folklore, many hacks have singled out blacks as the most likely perpetrators of fare-beating — but have unfairly extended this attitude to all black passengers. Which is why even a Danny Glover and a David Dinkins often have a problem finding a cab.
Glover and his lawyer simply want to increase the drivers’ diversity training. But that approach is unlikely to affect those motivated primarily by economics rather than ethnicity. Where the motivation to discriminate is economic, the penalty must be, as well.
As Mayor Giuliani rightly understands, only a fear of losing one’s livelihood, rather than hours of feelgood sessions, will deter cabdrivers from turning a blind eye to the black taxi-riding public.
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E-mail: efettmann@nypost.com