NYCLU files suit for cop suspended for involvement in racist float

The Associated Press

09.15.98

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NEW YORK -- A police officer, suspended because of his role in a Labor Day parade float that mocked the murder of a black man in Texas, filed a federal lawsuit yesterday in an effort win his job back.

Joseph Locurto's lawsuit, filed in Manhattan's U.S. District Court, alleges that he was illegally suspended for exercising his free-speech rights and deprived of his job without due process.

Locurto, 30, acknowledges in court papers that on Sept. 7 he "participated in an offensive float in a parade" in Broad Channel, a virtually all-white Queens community on an island in Jamaica Bay.

The float featured a banner that read, "Black to the Future 2098," and some participants performed a mock re-enactment of the dragging death of James Byrd, 49, in Jasper, Texas, in June.

The men on the float also wore blackface makeup and Afro or dreadlock-style wigs. They threw watermelons slices and fried chicken from the float and carried boom boxes.

Norman Siegel, the New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents Locurto, said that when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani learned that city employees were part of the float's activity, he said they would be fired.

Court papers say that while Locurto was at Siegel's office last Friday, Police Chief Charles Campisi, head of the Internal Affairs Bureau, showed up and suspended the officer without pay and confiscated his gun and shield.

Campisi was asked twice to cite the basis for Locurto's suspension but did not reply, court papers say. Siegel said the chief did tell Locurto he had to appear for a department interrogation on Wednesday at 10 a.m.

Siegel said Locurto, a police officer since February 1994 and assigned to the 104th precinct in Queens, was suspended without pay for "off-the-job, private, expressive activity without any charges, and no hearing."

News reports quoted Giuliani as saying, "The only way this guy gets back on the police force is if the Supreme Court of the United States tells us to put him back," according to court papers.

Siegel said the federal lawsuit, which names Giuliani, Police Commissioner Howard Safir and the city as defendants, seeks to get Locurto reinstated.

At a news conference Saturday, Locurto apologized for taking part in the float. "I'm not a racist," he said. "I'm a good person and I want people to see that. I made a mistake and I apologize for it."

The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the police officers' union, has refused to provide a legal defense for Locurto.

City officials did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

Update

Giuliani defends role in firing of NYC workers who paraded in blackface
Former mayor testifies that his statement that firefighters, cop would be dismissed wasn't an order but a prediction that could have been ignored by their bosses.  01.09.03