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On November 4, 1999, the well-known
actor Danny Glover charged a cabdriver with discrimination for refusing
to allow him to ride in the front passenger seat even though the back
seat was already occupied. Mr. Glover was traveling with his daughter
and her roommate, who were seated in the back of the cab. The Taxi and
Limousine Commission's rules make it clear that Mr. Glover should have
been allowed to sit in the front seat. This Commission is the City
agency charged with overseeing the taxi industry.
At a news conference in the lobby of the Commission, Glover, who is
black, said he was already angry because several hours earlier five
yellow cabs had failed to stop for him, his daughter and her roommate at
166th Street and 7th Avenue. "I was so angry. The
fact that my daughter's here to go to school, it really upsets me that
if she's standing on the corner waiting to get a cab, she can't get a
cab. It happens to her, it happens to countless people every single day.
The fact that I'm a celebrity, the fact that I'm visible, allows me to
draw attention to this."
And draw attention he did. Over the next month, a story about
discrimination by taxi drivers appeared in The New York Times
almost every day, and public officials around the state, and even around
the nation, weighed in with their views -- and even with changes in
policy.
On November 7, State Senator David A. Paterson and the Rev. Al Sharpton,
a well-known activist in the black community, said that they were
organizing a class-action lawsuit charging the city's Taxi and Limousine
Commission with racial discrimination. Senator Paterson, a Harlem
resident who is blind, said he had been "forced out" of cabs more than
100 times after he told the driver that his destination was Harlem.
Separately, a group of minority officers in the New York City Police
Department, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, said it had launched a
campaign within the department to persuade officers on the street to
devote more attention to the civil rights of those seeking taxis, and to
issue summonses to taxi drivers who illegally pass by black and Hispanic
customers.
A spokesman for the Taxi and Limousine Commission, Allan Fromberg,
declined to comment on either the threatened lawsuit or the campaign
proposed by the minority police group. But he defended the agency's
efforts to root out racial discrimination by cabdrivers, which include
fines and the use of undercover agents. "We don't simply wait until
people complain," he said. "We take pro-active steps." In the
Commission's undercover operation, for example, which is called
"Operation Refusal," agents, many of them black or Hispanic, are
dispatched across the city to hail cabs and pose as customers. When the
cabbies fail to stop or refuse to drive to the customer's desired
destination, they are fined. In the case of repeat violators, their taxi
licenses are revoked, Mr. Fromberg said. Between the summers of 1998 and
1999, the commission conducted more than 3,700 of these "tests" and
issued summons in 399 cases, more than 10 percent of the total, most of
them to drivers who refused passengers headed for neighborhoods out of
midtown Manhattan.
The calls for stricter enforcement were supported by many people. Ramona
Whaley, a board member of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, said "Of
course I have been passed by," and David N. Dinkins, a former mayor of
New York City, announced that the same thing had happened to him. In an
op-ed piece in the New York Post, Floyd Flake, a former black
congressman from Queens, wrote: "I don't know of an African-American who
has not endured the shame and anger of having a cab driver lock his
doors upon approaching them. An additional indignity usually follows:
the cracked window and the question about where the rider is headed --
and then the driver pulling off, saying he's not headed in that
direction." Mr. Flake dubs the practice "transportation apartheid" and
"drive-by racism."
In addition, the official statistics suggest that the problem is a large
one. Between July 1998 and July 1999, the police and the taxi commission
issued 1,233 summonses to taxi drivers for refusing passengers. However,
a city spokesman said that "we haven't determined yet how many of those
are just pure service refusals and how many of those can be proven to be
based on race."
New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani got into the act on November 11,
when he announced an undercover sting operation building on Operation
Refusal. This operation, to which we will return, soon became the center
of the debate.
Tax Drivers in New York
City
The behavior at issue here does not simply
reflect whites hating blacks. In fact, the cab driver involved in the
Glover complaint is from southern Asia. Moreover, recent immigrants from
Asia, the Middle East, and Africa now dominate the taxi industry in New
York City, bringing with them new strains of bigotry.
Most often, according to people in the taxi industry, racism is
perpetuated by cabbies whose attitudes have roots not only in colonial
rule and the strict social stratification of their native lands, but
also in the more recent distorted images of the global media. "Racist
images flow throughout the world," said Bhairavi Desai, a native of
India and the staff director of the Taxi Workers Alliance, a
2,000-member driver's group. Because of the impact of movies,
television, and rap music, she said, part of the baggage of some new
immigrants is an established, and sometimes deeply flawed, attitude
toward race. Among immigrant cabbies from some nations, including India,
she said, "many of the attitudes stem from a history of colonialism, and
from a sense of competing for bread crumbs with other poor people."
Although no precise breakdown is available, from 60 to 70 percent of the
city's yellow cab drivers are now immigrants from India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh, according to Mr. Fromberg. Among the other drivers, people
born in the United States or western Europe comprise a tiny minority
compared with the large number of immigrants from countries like Russia,
Korea, and the Sudan. This is, of course, a big change from just a few
decades ago. "It takes an issue that was once a classic confrontation
between blacks and working-class whites," said Philip Kasinitz, a
sociologist at Hunter College, "and makes it now a conflict between
African-Americans and immigrants of color, including a lot of black
immigrants."
As always, the taxi industry provides a grueling point of entry to the
American work force, and episodes of rudeness and discrimination
sometimes result from a drive to keep the fare box running. "Some
drivers really don't want to pick up minorities because they think it
will mean ending up in neighborhoods where they won't be able to find
another fare," said Edward Rogoff, a Baruch College professor and a
longtime taxi industry analyst. This perception is fueled by the maps
provided by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which stop at 96th
street and therefore imply that northern Manhattan is, as one observer
put it, "a wasteland."
The Problem of Anticipated Crime
Although racist attitudes and concerns about finding other fares no
doubt play a role in discrimination by cabbies, the most central issue
for most cabbies is undoubtedly their high vulnerability to robbery and
attack combined with a perception of higher rates of crime among
lower-income blacks and in certain areas of the city. Because of these
perceptions, some cabbies refuse to pick up black men at all.
According to Randolph Scott-McLaughlin, a professor at Pace Law School
who accompanied Glover to his press conference, cabdrivers today "have
adopted the same patterns of racial profiling that emerged when most
drivers were Irish, Italian-Americans, or from somewhere else in Europe.
No one is educating these people that we are not dangerous criminals,"
said Scott-McLaughlin.
The ethical quandary facing cabdrivers was clearly expressed by Paul
Frietz, a black native of Haiti who has been driving New York City taxis
for 15 years. He recalled being robbed, assaulted, and having his hand
broken in 1997 by two passengers, both young black men. "Now, Frietz
said, "I simply don't pick up teenagers. You're suppose to stop for
everybody, but do you really think cabdrivers are going to put our lives
on the line? That is nonsense, and you can be sure 99 percent of the
drivers agree."
Jacques Proro, another black Haitian with many years of experience as a
cabdriver, echoed Frietz's remarks. "There are two things you have to
make sure of as a taxi driver, that you are safe and that you get paid,"
said Proro. He said that he had sometimes decided not to pick up
customers who looked threatening or appeared to be unable to pay. "You
have to look before you stop," he said, adding that "unfortunately, the
problem is often with my people, with black people." Mohammad Kazem, a
cabdriver who emigrated from Iran, puts it this way: "It's not that
drivers are racist. They've been educated to think black people are
dangerous."
Mr. Fomberg, the spokesman for the Taxi and Limousine Commission, said
that city rules did not prohibit drivers from using discretion in
selecting customers. "It is perfectly within the rules to refuse someone
who is acting belligerent or shows clear indications of being drunk," he
said. It is only discrimination, Mr. Fromberg explained, if customers
are rejected solely on the basis of their race.
Although troubling, the perceptions of cab drivers contain at least an
element of the truth. According to a 1994 report by the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics, "Taxicab drivers and chauffeurs face unusually high
risks of becoming homicide victims. This occupation accounted for almost
one-10th of all victims of job-related homicide but less than one-half
of 1 percent of the nation's work force. Nocturnal trips, especially
those to secluded areas, make these drivers particularly vulnerable.
Almost half the cabdrivers died from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m."
Moreover, it is a bitter fact of life that black males in America commit
crimes of violence far out of proportion to their numbers. They account
for more than 40 percent of those arrested for violent crimes and 56
percent of those arrested for murder. Thirteen percent of black men are
convicted felons. These facts affect the perceptions of all Americans,
black and white. "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in
my life," lamented the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1993, "than to walk down
the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then
look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
No one keeps statistics on the race or ethnicity of people who rob or
murder cabdrivers, either in the nation as a whole or in New York City.
However, police officials in New York City confirm that young black men
are disproportionately represented among those arrested for crimes
against cabdrivers.
Giuliani's Crackdown
The Giuliani sting operation began on November
12 with 150 police officers and taxi inspectors. In later months, the
operation involved 150 officers and taxi inspectors at work on two or
three unannounced days, with 20 to 30 undercover officials on duty the
rest of the time. "We are perfectly entitled to do this," Giuliani said
at the news conference announcing the operation. "I know we're going to
get the same howls and screams and yells that we got when we did this
with drunk drivers."(2)
Giuliani pitched this operation as a toughening of two existing but only
nominally successful undercover efforts, both called Operation Refusal,
one run by the Police Department, the other by the Taxi and Limousine
Commission. Both have issued summonses against drivers, he said, but
neither has taken away any cabs. "What we're trying to do," the mayor
said, "is intensify it dramatically in order to make the point."
In the new operation, police officers and taxi inspectors work
undercover in multiracial groups of three. As a supervisor observes, a
black officer and a white officer standing near each other attempt to
hail a cab. If the black person is passed up in favor of the white
person, something blacks say happens all the time, the driver is issued
a summons on the spot suspending his hack license (the official name for
the license to drive a taxi). The police then take the cab to the
nearest police station, where it is to be picked up by either the taxi
owner (who is invariably not the driver) or another licensed driver. The
suspended driver then faces a hearing before an administrative law judge
within five days.
Mr. Fromberg said that a driver with a clean record would probably get
the license back immediately, but would still have to face a separate
hearing at the taxi commission on the charge of refusing to pick up a
passenger. The taxi commission's penalty for a first offense is $200 to
$350. A third offense calls for a mandatory revocation of a hack
license. "The drivers clearly know that refusal is against the law,"
said Diane McGrath-McKechnie, the taxi commissioner. "And this is the
Giuliani administration's attempt to ratchet that up so people
understand. If the cabdrivers can't see decency on a human level, they
will understand it on an economic level."
Several black officials, including State Senator Patterson, praised the
mayor's decision. But Mr. Glover's lawyer, Mr. Scott-McLaughlin,
immediately criticized it as the "wrong approach" and a "Band-Aid" on a
longstanding problem. "Using the police to demonize the drivers is not
the approach that Danny Glover wishes to take," said Scott-McLaughlin.
"Instead, the Taxi Commission should increase its diversity training for
drivers" to offset their distorted images of America and their attitudes
rooted in the social stratification of their native countries.
Norman Siegel, the director of the Civil Liberties Union, said that his
group was considering a suit against the city claiming that it is
overstepping its legal authority by taking away a driver's livelihood on
the basis of an accusation. "The problem is that they are punishing
drivers before giving them a chance to explain their side of the story.
There is due process of law, so you can't just hang people first and
then give them the trial afterward." Mr. Siegel applauded Mayor
Giuliani's effort to stop racial discrimination by cabdrivers, but he
said the effort was narrow and ill conceived. He said he was working
with cab owners and drivers to put together a more comprehensive
approach to the problem that would add education to enforcement. "If we
want to reduce stereotyping and racial discrimination, which we do, we
need to educate and persuade, not merely coerce and punish," he said.
"Otherwise, nothing will change."
Cabbies' reactions to the crackdown on taxi drivers ranged from grudging
acceptance to disbelief. Yes, many cabbies say, it is rotten, it is
cruel when a black man can't get a taxi to take home from work. But not
as cruel as when a taxi driver gets robbed at gunpoint -- or stabbed --
or killed -- by a passenger. "The crackdown is unfair; he's just doing
this for politics," said Yousif Ibrahim, a cabdriver who was born in
Brooklyn but grew up in Egypt. "Let the mayor drive a yellow cab for a
day and see what will happen to him." Other drivers said they had been
cheated too many times by people who don't pay, or mugged too many
times, to take another chance. "We try to make a living, that's all,"
said Michel Cajuste, another Haitian cabbie. "We are not racists."
Another cabdriver, who did not want his name to be used, said "I'd
rather be fined than have my wife a widow."
A few cabbies expressed sympathy with the mayor's plan. Sammy Arafat, an
immigrant from Egypt, said he favored the mayor's crackdown, even though
he had been victimized by robbers. "I think what the mayor has said is
O.K., because it is wrong to have cabbies turning down little old ladies
or people on the basis of race.," he said. But Arafat said he would
continue to use his judgment about whom to pick up, even if such
decisions did not strictly conform to the taxi industry crackdown.
"Sometimes, people just look terrible," he said. "Then I won't stop."
Other citizens had decidedly mixed reactions to the Mayor's new
operation. After all, many New Yorker's said, being a taxi driver is a
rough and marginal business, full of danger and uncertainty. So the fact
that taxi drivers are sometimes picky about who they choose as
passengers cannot be simply chalked up to blatant racial discrimination.
"Eight out of 10 times, if a black or Hispanic tries to stop a yellow
cab, the cab is going to go by," said Fitzroy Jordan, a car service
driver. "But I have friends who are cabdrivers, and I know that they are
afraid of being robbed, and not being paid, and I can understand that."
Lydia Washington, a black accountant in midtown Manhattan, said cabbies
had refused to take her to her home in the Bronx, but she also feels
uncomfortable with Giuliani's solution. "I think he needs to do
something, but taking the cab away? I don't know," Ms. Washington said.
"If it was anybody but Giuliani, I'd say it was extreme." Nuruz Rahman
was very upset about the plan. "Cabbies come from India, Bangladesh, and
Pakistan. Isn't there a trace of racism in the outcry against them.
Instead of using our police as decoys, perhaps we should use them to
better protect our cabdrivers."
"I wouldn't put it past a lot of cabs," said Nat DiTerlizzi, who works
for Off-Track Betting. "You have no reason to doubt Glover. It's
demeaning. But it's your cab, it's your money, you do what you want.
It's not right, humanly, you know, but there's freedom of choice, too."
Pinky Pandya, an auditor at a Manhattan accounting firm, said "I think
its a problem, and I think they do judge. But for them, it's for their
own protection, I guess. I mean, if someone looks threatening, would you
let them in your car?"
The Policy Choices
Many policy makers are skeptical of the Mayor's
sting operation. Some say it is simply another instance of a mayor
trying to get free publicity at the expense of, in this case,
cabdrivers. Others say that Mayor Giuliani should have addressed the
issue sooner, particularly since the problem is well known and has vexed
previous mayors for years. Still others say that many cabbies will
probably return to their discriminating ways as soon as the sting ends.
A report issued by the State Attorney General, Elliot L. Spitzer, at the
end of November also undermined Mayor Giuliani's credibility on this
issue. This report found that minorities are disproportionately stopped
and searched by New York City police officers -- behavior based on
exactly the same kind of racial profiling that the taxi sting operation
is designed to stop. New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir
angrily denied the validity of this report.
Of course, other policy makers applaud the mayor for taking a key first
step. Enforcing laws against discrimination is a central element in any
solution to this problem, they say. People in this camp urge Mayor
Giuliani to follow up with other, broader policies, so that this
crack-down will be more effective than similar one-shot efforts by
previous administrations. The key issue, these policy makers say, is to
find ways to keep taxi drivers safe. Far too many drivers are beaten,
robbed, or killed by their passengers. The city must find ways to
protect drivers if it wants to persuade them not to discriminate against
passengers.
Gorman Gilbert, former chair of the Taxi and Limousine Commission,
suggests that the taxi medallion owners, not just the taxi drivers,
should be brought into the picture. In New York City, it is not legal to
operate a cab without a medallion, but the people who own the medallions
rarely drive themselves. Instead they hire drivers. "Suppose medallion
owners were fined," Gilbert says, "when their drivers refused service.
And suppose repeat offenders could have their medallions taken away.
Then owners might work harder to make sure that drivers felt safe."
Policies that medallion owners might pursue, according to Gilbert,
include "equipping taxis with safety devices like two-way radios, silent
alarms, video cameras, vaults for storing fare money, and automatic
vehicle location systems that could help the police find cabs quickly in
times of emergency. Owners might also establish safety procedures for
protecting drivers headed toward high-crime areas."
The Assignment
The New York City Council has decided to hold
hearings on possible discrimination by tax drivers. You have been asked
to testify. The Council wants to know your views about the Giuliani
crackdown (as a matter of policy, not of law) and your views on
additional or alternative policies toward taxi discrimination that
should be implemented in New York City. The Council would also be glad
to have your help in understanding this problem: why do taxi drivers
discriminate against certain groups and who should be held responsible
for fixing the problem?.
Bibliography
Elisabeth Bumiller, "Cabbies Who Bypass Blacks
Will Lose Cars, Giuliani Says," The New York Times, November
11, 1999.
David W. Chen, "Many Riders See Nuances in Bias by Cabbies," The New
York Times, November 12, 1999.
Gorman Gilbert, "Keep Cabbies Safe, and Passengers' Rights Will Follow,"
The New York Times, November 13, 1999.
Jeff Jacoby, "Cabbie Snubs in NYYC: Is It Racism or Is It Prudence?",
Syracuse Herald American, November 21, 1999, pp. D-1 & D-6.
Thomas J. Lueck, "After Complaints by Actor, Group Will Sue Taxi Panel,"
The New York Times, November 7, 1999.
Thomas J. Lueck, "New York's Cabbies Show How Multi-Colored Racism Can
Be," The New York Times, November 7, 1999.
Thomas J. Lueck, "Safety Issue Is Stressed by Cabbies in Bias Effort,"
The New York Times, November 11, 1999.
Nurez Rahman, Letter to the Editor, The New York Times,
November 13, 1999.
Kit R. Roane, "Safir Attacks State Finding of Racial Inequity in
Searches." The New York Times, December 2, 1999.
Somini Sengupta, "In Cabby Bias Debate, Rifts Go Beyond Skin Color,
The New York Times, November 19, 1999.
Monte Williams, "Actor Danny Glover Alleges Bias by Cabbies," The
New York Times, November 4.
1. This case
was written by Professor John Yinger solely for the purposes of class
discussion. All the quotations and some of the sentences in the text are
taken directly from the newspaper articles in the bibliography.
2. In
February, the mayor announced that the police would seize the cars of
people arrested on charges of driving while drunk.