Former New York City police commissioner Howard Safir dies

NEW YORK (AP) — Howard Safir, the former New York City police commissioner whose four-year tenure in the late 1990s included sharp declines in the city’s murder tolls but also some of its most notorious episodes of police killings of Black men, has died. Safir’s son told The New York Times his father had died Monday in Annapolis, Maryland. He was 81. Safir was appointed by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The murder count fell under Safir between 1996 and 2000. But some of the city’s most heated moments of racial tension occurred during Safir’s time like the 1997 brutalization of Abner Louima and the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo.