POLITICS CONYERS REPORT: DOES ANYONE CARE?

Every other City Council meeting or so, Al Lipscomb jumps up from his seat and demands that the city staff get him a copy of the Conyers report. If you’ve forgotten it, don’t feel alone. After the controversial police shooting of seventy-year-old Etta Collins in the fall of 1986, the minority community was seething with cries of police brutality. Eventually the City Council voted 8-2 to ask U.S. Representative John Conyers Jr., D-Michigan, to bring his House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice to town to investigate. Conyers, who spends a good deal of his time responding to requests of this nature, did so in May 1987 and promised a full report with recommendations in a few months. That was nineteen months ago, and some-including Lipscomb-are wondering when Conyers will send his recommendations.

“It’ll probably be sometime next summer-if you keep your fingers crossed,” says an off-the-record source in the subcommittee’s Washington office. She says it will take at least that long to get the “book” printed, but refuses to say if Conyers and company have finished writing the report or what any of the recommendations may be. At the time of the hearings. County Commissioner John Wiley Price said that “sometimes, just airing the complaint would be sufficient.” It seems now that that may be the only worth of the hearings, which fairly wracked this city with agony at the time.

“I think the Conyers committee served its purpose at its time,” says Lipscomb. “But I’m sad that they see fit to drag it out for so long. It’s extremely disrespectful to the City Council and the people of this city. And that borders on vulgarity.” Even if the city had gotten the report quickly, however, the effect might have been nil. A subcommittee staff attorney said before the Dallas hearings that earlier subcommittee hearings in New York were worthless. “If you call up there today,” the attorney said, “and ask who remembers the recommendations, I doubt you’ll find anyone who does.”

And what would Lipscomb do with the report if it suddenly appeared? “1 would place it in my bathroom, because that’s all it’s worth now,” he says. Presumably it would go the way that Sears and Roebuck catalogues used to go a couple of generations ago.