NEW YORK — Howard Safir, the former New York City Police Commissioner whose four-year tenure in the late 1990s included sharp declines in the city’s murder count but also some of the most notorious episodes of police killings of black men, died.
Safir’s son told the New York Times that his father had died Monday in a hospital in Annapolis, Maryland, from a sepsis infection. He was 81 years old.
Current NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban issued a statement expressing the department’s condolences and saying that Safir, who served from 1996 to 2000, “was a devoted and dynamic leader.”
Safir was appointed to the NYPD’s top job by then-Major Rudolph Giuliani, who had appointed him fire commissioner two years earlier.
Safir succeeded William Bratton, who had instituted police tactics that had been successful in reducing the annual number of murders, but who stayed on after falling out with Giuliani.
The murder count continued to fall under Safir, with fewer than 700 the year he left the job, compared to more than 1,100 the year before he started.
But some of the city’s most heated moments of racial tension also occurred during Safir’s time in office.
In 1997, police arrested Haitian immigrant Abner Louima and officers mistreated him at the police station. In 1999, four plainclothes officers shot Amadou Diallo, from Guinea, in front of his building in the Bronx, thinking his wallet was a gun.
In 2000, an undercover officer approached Patrick Dorismond, a black man, in an attempt to buy drugs. After Dorismond became offended, a fight broke out and an officer shot and killed him.
All of the incidents sparked outrage against the department and its leadership.
2023-09-13 14:12:53
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