Louima: It seems like just yesterday

(AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett)

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of Abner Louima being assaulted by NYC Police officers in the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn, NY.

It was August 9, 1997, when Louima was arrested outside Club Rendez-Vous while trying to break up a fight between two women. Club Rendez-Vous still remains a popular spot in East Flatbush, Brooklyn and is the scene of numerous altercations that lead to Police being summoned.

What took place to Louima that night at the 70th Precinct was not only horrific, but it confirmed many people’s feelings that cops used their power, at times, for the wrong thing.


The officers that responded to the club- Justin Volpe, Charles Schwarz, Thomas Bruder, and Thomas Wiese- were to break-up the fight and restore order, but what really took place during the scuffle remains a mystery still.

Officer Justin Volpe, who claimed he was “sucker punched” by Louima arrested Louima and charged him with disorderly conduct, obstructing government administration and resisting arrest.

Eyewitness accounts stated that the arresting officers then proceeded to beat Louima with fists, night sticks and their hand-held police radios. To say that they messed Louima up would be an understatement comparable only to what took place on March 3, 1991, when officers in Los Angeles brutally beat Rodney King.

Being beaten in the streets of Brooklyn was not the end of the assault on Louima. The assault continued at the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn where Louima was strip-searched, kicked in the groin and sodomized in the bathroom with a toilet plunger by Justin Volpe.
It was reported that Volpe then walked through the precinct holding the bloody, excrement-stained plunger in his hand and indicating that he had “broke a man down.”

This brutal attack on a man that was “trying to do the right thing” while attempting to stop the women from fighting, confirms that the devil does exist. Volpe and the other Officers made a decision that evening that may have been precipitated by having to respond to calls of domestic violence, a murder scene, or a car accident, but it still doesn’t warrant another human being mistreating and, ultimately, disrespecting another human being.

What we learn from brutal attacks like the Louima case is that, as human beings, we forget how to be human. We forget that what we say and what we do have a large impact on ourselves and the people around us. Just as we struggle to put meaning for a husband or wife killing their partner or a parent mistreating their child, we have to help one another become connected to the community and the world, because there is a GREAT need for more personal interaction and communication.

We have come a long way from the days of slavery, but we have a long way to go to learn about differences and how those differences can be used to teach and educate; the key being the willingness to learn and say to one self, “I don’t know everything.”

So, on this day that marks the 10th anniversary of the Abner Louima assault, work to not harbor jealously and hatred to your brothers and sisters and realize that we all want the same things—happiness, love from family, and a place in the World.

August 29, 1997, in New York. The march was dubbed "Day of Outrage Against Police Brutality and Harassment."(AP Photo/Michael Schmelling)

Two-year-old Kiara Roberts holds a bathroom plunger and a sign as thousands of people marched to Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct in New York, August 1997, to protest police brutality against Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. (AP Photo/Damon Winter)