Howard Safir, NYPD commissioner under Giuliani
Howard Safir, who presided over declining rates of violent crime as New York City's police commissioner in the late 1990s, but who struck many New Yorkers as tone-deaf to racial sensibilities after the shooting deaths of Black men by his officers, died Monday in Annapolis, Maryland. He was 81.
His son, Adam, said his death, at a hospital, was caused by a sepsis infection. Safir, who had a home in Annapolis, underwent double bypass heart surgery and was treated for prostate cancer while he was commissioner.
As mayor, Rudy Giuliani put Safir in charge of the Police Department in 1996. The two men had known each other since the early 1980s, when Safir was a top figure in the U.S. Marshals Service and Giuliani was a senior Justice Department official. Two years earlier, upon becoming mayor, Giuliani had made his old colleague the fire commissioner.
But in April 1996, Giuliani needed a new police commissioner to replace William Bratton, who had resigned after falling out of favor with City Hall, and it was clear that Safir's primary assignment was to be his predecessor's temperamental opposite.
Bratton's aggressive policing tactics had accelerated a decline in major crime that had begun under the previous mayor, David Dinkins. But Bratton had sinned, by all accounts — at least in the eyes of a mayor ill-disposed to being outshined — by relishing the limelight and New York's nightlife.
In the jut-jawed, tightlipped Safir (pronounced SAY-fur), Giuliani had a loyalist content to work in the mayoral shadow, someone uninterested in currying favor with the news media. Clearly contrasting himself with Bratton, Safir said back then, “I do not believe that the New York City Police Department ought to be identified by personality.”
He bridled at suggestions that he was merely a caretaker at police headquarters, with the mayor calling the shots. While building on Bratton's crime-fighting innovations, he added strategies of his own, like expanding the department's antidrug efforts, improving officer training and promoting the greater use of DNA in criminal cases.
Murders, the most closely watched crime category, fell impressively on Safir's watch, as they already had since peaking at 2,262 in 1990. They dropped from 1,177 in 1995, the year before he took over, to 673 in 2000, his last year in the job. (New York murders would decline even further in following decades; in 2022, the police recorded 433 homicides, the fewest since 2019.)
Still, those successes were eclipsed by disastrous events that fanned criticism of Safir as a racially insensitive leader who allowed his officers to run amok. He called such attacks unfair and noted, correctly, that New York's police force was far more restrained in its use of firearms than it had been in earlier decades. Nonetheless, he was undermined at times by the starkness of several incidents, and by his own pugnaciously defensive manner.
In August 1997, a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub and taken to a police station, where officers beat him; one of them shoved a broken broomstick up his rectum.
In February 1999, an immigrant from Guinea, Amadou Diallo, was killed outside his Bronx apartment building by four plainclothes officers. As they approached, he reached for his wallet. Mistaking it for a gun, the officers opened fire — 41 shots in all, 19 of which struck Diallo. The incident led to weeks of protests at police headquarters, joined by celebrities and leading politicians, including Dinkins.
Then, in March 2000, outside a Manhattan bar, an undercover police officer looking to make an arrest approached a Black man named Patrick M. Dorismond and asked about buying drugs. Dorismond took offense. A scuffle ensued. The officer drew his gun and fired, mortally wounding Dorismond.
The shooting angered many New Yorkers, outrage that deepened when the mayor and the police commissioner sought to disparage the dead man by taking the rare step of releasing his sealed juvenileoffender record from years earlier. This was “no altar boy,” Giuliani said. In fact, Dorismond had once been an altar boy.
Although those episodes led to some altered policies and the reassignment of officers, Safir's default position was to defend the department's tactics and to dismiss his critics as political grandstanders. In the wake of the Diallo killing, he told a City Council hearing, “I believe that many of the loudest voices that we are hearing are using a tragic incident as a vehicle to attempt to undermine a police officer's ability to conduct lawful investigations of suspected criminal activity.”
His tolerance for nonviolent protest was similarly limited. When taxi drivers, unhappy with municipal policies affecting them, slowed traffic and rallied outside City Hall, the commissioner likened them to terrorists and posted sharpshooters on nearby rooftops.
Yet his own behavior — including a penchant for filing lawsuits when aggrieved — raised eyebrows at times, such as when he assigned eight police detectives to guard his daughter's wedding, or when he sent detectives to interrogate a woman involved in a fender-bender accident with his wife, Carol.