Introduction

Abstract

In August 1997, Abner Louima was tortured and sexually assaulted in Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct station house. As this incident began to create national shock waves, a personal advisor to Louima suggested he say that during the attack one officer had asserted that it was “Giuliani time,” meaning that the police could act with relative impunity (Kocieniewski 1997, Toobin 2002). Although Louima later recanted this statement, the retraction came only after the quote had saturated media coverage of the event. Despite the fact that it turned out to be untrue, local communities were galvanized by the comment because they thought it embodied police culture under Mayor Giuliani. The brutality that Louima experienced and the discourse that swirled around his assault will likely be long discussed by urban sociologists and historians as evidence of New York City’s political culture in the 1990s.