City Denies Due Process to Cabbies

9/21/00 Thursday p. A51

By Daniel Ackman

BACK IN November, Danny Glover complained that he had trouble hailing a cab because he was black. Glover's complaint is long-standing and legitimate, and few cabbies deny it is often true. But Glover is a movie star, so the mayor and the Taxi and Limousine Commission jumped to react as never before.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and TLC chairwoman, Diane McGrath-McKechnie, announced a sting operation and dictated that the city would confiscate the hack license of any cabbie even suspected of refusing service to a minority passenger. The sting was dubbed "Operation Refusal" -and the term applied in more ways than one. For in carrying out its plan, the TLC also refused to grant cabbies hearings; it refused to follow its own rules; and it refused to adhere to the Constitution.

The TLC did all this based on the supposed need to rid the city of "racist" cabbies. Trumpeting its simon-pure motives, the TLC suspended the licenses of more than 150 hard-working hacks. The first problem with this response is that drivers were having their licenses revoked on the scantiest evidence that hardly proved them racists. The second problem is that the TLC continues to suspend licenses without offering any evidence at all.

Take the case of Ebenezer Asamoah. The native of Ghana and son of a Presbyterian minister was idling at a red light in November. There was another empty cab to his right. Across the intersection, two men were hailing cabs. The nearer one was Hispanic. A white man in an army jacket was up the block a bit.

When the light changed, Asamoah let his fellow cabbie take the first fare and he took the second. As it turned out, both fares were TLC inspectors and they accused him of "refusing" the Hispanic man.

Asamoah and a fellow cabbie, a native of India named Rajrender Sharma who stopped to help, told the inspectors that, if Asamaoh headed for the closer fare, he would have caused an accident. But the inspectors had caught a big fish and were not about to throw it back. They took Asamoah's taxi and confiscated his license on the spot.

The TLC's policy is verdict first, trial later. The agency has empowered its agents to suspend licenses and confiscate taxicabs right on the street. No hearing. No evidence. No nothing.

The TLC then conducts a "pre-suspension" hearing. At this hearing, the driver is not permitted to present evidence or even offer his side of the story. The presiding TLC judges invariably rule that the suspension should be continued.

By the time the cabbie receives a full hearing, weeks or months have passed. Meanwhile, the suspension continues. This is the case despite the fact that the driver has not been found guilty of anything. Overriding everything is that there is no law, no regulation, that authorizes either summary suspension or the revocation of a hack license in these circumstances.

If the TLC did not know this when it launched the program, it would soon learn. Time after time, judges of the city's Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings ruled that the offending cabbie could be fined. The law, however, did not and does not authorize license revocation.

In Asamoah's case, for example, Judge Deirdre Tompkins determined that the TLC could not revoke his license because there was no statute or rule that permitted it to do so. The commission, she said, "circumvent[ed]" the law and acted in a way inconsistent with its own statute.

How has the TLC reacted to the judges' rulings? The agency has simply ignored the courts -and the law -and kept the suspensions in effect for months on end. Worse, McGrath-McKechnie, a Republican fund-raiser who has never worked in any aspect of the taxi industry, started to bring cases in her own courts, thereby avoiding the pesky, independent Office of Administrative Trials judges altogether. With TLC lawyers arguing before the TLC's own handpicked judges, the results were predictably more to the commissioner's liking.

Asamoah was faced with losing his license for good until the TLC commissioners-led by Alberto Torres, a lawyer appointed by the city council and influenced perhaps by a class action suit in federal court-stood up to McGrath-McKechnie and demanded the agency comply with the law.

"I want to make clear," Torres said in response to one of McGrath-McKechnie's remarks about her own power, "that the commissioner speaks for herself. When she says 'we,' that does not include the rest of us." The commissioners refused to validate the agency's actions and demanded that drivers only be fined and their licenses suspended (getting credit for time served), but not revoked.

According to the commission's vote, Asamoah would get his license back.

Other cabbies won't be so lucky, since McGrath-McKechnie has arrogated to herself the right to revoke licenses in most cases without even consulting the commission as a whole.

Recently, McGrath-McKechnie, alone in some cases, continued to vote for revocation. She sat in her hearing room -flanked by her lawyers, her spokesmen and her armed guards-while lecturing immigrant taxi drivers about "discrimination" and "learning their lesson." She claimed that the TLC policy has been upheld in court. In fact, the opposite is true.

It may be that a few cabbies are racist. More are fearful of high-crime neighborhoods or worried about being beaten on a fare. Mostly, they are just trying to earn a living. These cabbies have no power, no voice. But they should have rights. The law pertaining to cabbies who refuse fares is crystal clear.

Commissioner McGrath-McKechnie is arrogantly still flouting it.

Daniel Ackman is a lawyer, journalist and screen writer in New York.