By Robert W. Snyder

In 1966, when blockbusting landlords and rising crime put an integrated section of Washington Heights in Manhattan on edge, the murder of a candy store owner sparked a protest. Residents – outraged at the killing and fearful that it would spur White flight – marched to the 30th Precinct to demand better police protection. Among them was a local State Assemblyman – an ex-Marine named David Dinkins.

Dinkins, who passed away on Nov. 23rd,  is better known for his role as New York’s mayor during the Crown Heights riots of 1991, when tensions between Lubavitcher Hasidim and African Americans exploded in three days of rioting and the mortal wounding of a Jewish scholar. Many observers concluded that the mayor was too slow to deploy the police. But a tight focus on those awful events obscures two great strengths in Dinkins that still matter: His commitments to interracial democracy and just policing.

In years when racial tensions ran high, Dinkins affirmed a multi-racial vision of his city. And in the face of high crime, he worked to reconcile the city’s police force and its diverse communities to make New York a city of order and justice. In 2020, after months of protest over police brutality, we have yet to realize his vision.

Dinkins was part of a cohort of African American politicians, rooted in Harlem, who knew the value of patronage and party loyalty. But his political education didn’t stop there.  He combined a regular Democrat’s appreciation of party structure with a liberal’s appreciation for change. If the regular Democrat in Dinkins could make him seem deliberate to a fault, the liberal in him broadened his political horizons and political partners.

For example, one of his close friends and advisors was Albert Blumberg, a Rutgers professor and Democratic district leader who had been a communist from the 1930s to the 1950s. Dinkins was also a member of Democratic Socialists of America, where he found allies – most of them white – who worked to counter conservative policies of then-Mayor Ed Koch.

The greatest tests of Dinkins’ principles came on the issues of crime and policing, both of which were tied up with the city’s rancorous racial politics. Dinkins knew that Blacks suffered disproportionately from crime. (As mayor he never tired of telling his staff that he had been through a holdup in a bodega.) He also knew that for all of conservatives’ calls for law and order, they had not reduced crime.

Dinkins redefined the crime issue in ways that resonated with African Americans and progressives; he worked to improve police-community relations and described public safety as “a basic civil right of all our people, as fundamental as the franchise and fair housing.” In a city where relations between police and African Americans have a long and painful history, this meant confronting many problems.

To fight crime, he won funding from the State Legislature to hire more police officers. He embraced a philosophy of community policing, and appointed as police commissioner an expert in the strategy, Lee Patrick Brown, a former police officer with a Ph.D. in criminology from Berkeley (who later became the mayor of Houston).

Dinkins also overcame intense police opposition as the City Council voted to establish a Civilian Complaint Review Board. And the Mollen Commission he established uncovered crooked partnerships between police officers and drug dealers, exposed police wrongdoing that poisoned community relations, and laid bare the link between police corruption and police brutality.

Crime began to decline during Dinkins’s mayoralty, but the trend was too brief to be transforming. After Republican Rudolph Giuliani narrowly defeated Dinkins to win the mayoralty in 1993, he employed a crime-fighting approach that did not share Dinkins’ concern for police-community relations, and he reaped enormous political benefit when crime continued to fall dramatically. Giuliani had no interest in the independent oversight of the police recommended by the Mollen Commission, and in subsequent decades the police have so often ignored the Civilian Complaint Review Board that it has become virtually toothless.

As former mayor Michael Bloomberg observed, Dinkins “helped set the city on a course for success – and a reduction in crime – that no one at the time imagined possible.” True. But Dinkins’s goal was policing that was both effective and just. That battle, as we have been drastically reminded in 2020, still needs to be won.

Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and journalism at Rutgers University. He is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York.

Photos by: J-No.