Posted on 04/02/2007 5:38:34 AM PDT by pissant
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani announced an undercover sting operation yesterday that will take away the cabs of drivers who refuse to pick up minority passengers. His decision came less than a week after the actor Danny Glover complained that several New York taxi drivers had refused to pick him up because he is black.
The operation, also aimed at cabbies who refuse to take passengers to places they want to go, usually minority neighborhoods, is to begin tomorrow at 7 a.m. with 150 police officers and taxi inspectors.
''We are perfectly entitled to do this,'' Mr. Giuliani said at a news conference. ''I know we're going to get the same howls and screams and yells that we got when we did this with drunk drivers.'' In February, the mayor announced that the police would seize the cars of people arrested on charges of driving while drunk.
Several black officials praised the mayor's decision, including State Senator David A. Paterson, a Harlem resident who has said he has been forced out of cabs more than 100 times because his destination was Harlem. He called the mayor's decision ''very proactive.''
But Mr. Glover's lawyer, Randolph M. Scott-McLaughlin, immediately criticized it as the ''wrong approach'' and a ''Band-Aid'' on a longstanding problem.
''Using the police to demonize the drivers is not the approach that Danny Glover wishes to take,'' said Mr. Scott-McLaughlin, the director of the Pace Law School Social Justice Center. Mr. Glover, a star of the ''Lethal Weapon'' series, ''Beloved'' and other films, was in Senegal yesterday and unavailable for comment.
(Excerpt) Read more at query.nytimes.com ...
Thank you. Do you have specials at Denny's?
I have the feeling you're not enamored of Mr. Guiliani. LOL!
But I thought Rudolph was an anti-crime Mayor.....OTOH, he might be said to be an ethnic-cleanser, considering the non-US nationalities of most NY cabbies....
FREEDOM IS ABOUT AUTHORITY!
"Thank you. Do you have specials at Denny's?"
LOL. Order me some more coffee.
I once got lost while walking in St. Petersburg, FL and wound up in the middle of the ghetto at night. Eventually I found an open convenience store and called a cab, not wanting to walk back to my hotel.
I waited for over an hour and no cab came, despite the dispatcher saying repeatedly that they were on the way.
Finally I told the dispatcher that the driver would know who I was by my being the only white person in the place. A cab arrived in less than 5 minutes.
The driver, who happened to be a large black man, said that none of the drivers would pick up fares from that area after dark, as several drivers had been killed after doing so in the last few years. LOL
Or blind people with seeing eye dogs.
Cabbies that don't pick up gang bangers of any race are smart, and still alive.
And that's quite a different thing from "refus[ing] to pick up minority passengers."
What has he done since stepping down from being mayor that his fans have tried to sell us on? Nothing? Yes, that's right, nothing.
Guess we'll just have to keep looking at his public record as mayor.
That's funny to you?
Yep, I already knew that Giuliani was a control freak, but a fair number of Freepers either don't know or don't care. Thanks for bringing this up.
Well, Giuliani does collect large fees for speeches in which he talks tough and makes the Rudy fanatics here swoon.
Blacks, especially young black males, commit 50% of all violent crimes in the United States. Who can blame the cabbies for wanting to avoid being robbed, beaten or killed? They are just using common sense.
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