Howard Safir, N.Y.P.D. Commissioner Under Giuliani, Is Dead at 81

Howard Safir, who presided over declining rates of violent crime as New York City’s police commissioner in the late 1990s, but who struck many New Yorkers as tone-deaf to racial sensibilities after the shooting deaths of Black men by his officers, died on Monday in Annapolis, Md. He was 81.

His son, Adam, said his death, at a hospital, was caused by a sepsis infection. Mr. Safir, who had a home in Annapolis, underwent double bypass heart surgery and was treated for prostate cancer while he was commissioner.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani put Mr. Safir in charge of the Police Department in 1996. The two men had known each other since the early 1980s, when Mr. Safir was a top figure in the United States Marshals Service and Mr. Giuliani was a senior Justice Department official. Two years earlier, upon becoming mayor, Mr. Giuliani had made his old colleague the fire commissioner.

But in April 1996 Mr. Giuliani needed a new police commissioner to replace William J. Bratton, who had resigned after falling out of favor with City Hall, and it was clear that Mr. Safir’s primary assignment was to be his predecessor’s temperamental opposite.

Mr. Bratton’s aggressive policing tactics had accelerated a decline in major crime that had begun under the previous mayor, David N. Dinkins. But Mr. Bratton had sinned, by all accounts — at least in the eyes of a mayor ill disposed to being outshined — by relishing the limelight and New York’s nightlife.

In the jut-jawed, tight-lipped Mr. Safir (pronounced SAY-fur), Mr. Giuliani had a loyalist content to work in the mayoral shadow, someone uninterested in currying favor with the news media. Clearly contrasting himself with Mr. Bratton, Mr. Safir said back then, “I do not believe that the New York City Police Department ought to be identified by personality.”

He bridled at suggestions that he was merely a caretaker at police headquarters, with the mayor calling the shots. While building on Mr. Bratton’s crime-fighting innovations, he added strategies of his own, like expanding the department’s antidrug efforts, improving officer training and promoting the greater use of DNA in criminal cases.

Murders, the most closely watched crime category, fell impressively on Mr. Safir’s watch, as they already had since peaking at 2,262 in 1990. They dropped from 1,177 in 1995, the year before he took over, to 673 in 2000, his last year in the job. (New York murders would decline even further in following decades; in 2022, the police recorded 433 homicides, the fewest since 2019.)

Still, those successes were eclipsed by disastrous events that fanned criticism of Mr. Safir as a racially insensitive leader who allowed his officers to run amok. He called such attacks unfair and noted, correctly, that New York’s police force was far more restrained in its use of firearms than it had been in earlier decades. Nonetheless, he was undermined at times by the starkness of several incidents, and by his own pugnaciously defensive manner.

In August 1997, a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub and taken to a police station, where officers beat him; one of them shoved a broken broomstick up his rectum.

In February 1999, an immigrant from Guinea, Amadou Diallo, was killed outside his Bronx apartment building by four plainclothes officers. As they approached, he reached for his wallet. Mistaking it for a gun, the officers opened fire — 41 shots in all, 19 of which struck Mr. Diallo. The incident led to weeks of protests at police headquarters, joined by celebrities and leading politicians, including former Mayor Dinkins.

Then, in March 2000, outside a Manhattan bar, an undercover police officer looking to make an arrest approached a Black man named Patrick M. Dorismond and asked about buying drugs. Mr. Dorismond took offense. A scuffle ensued. The officer drew his gun and fired, mortally wounding Mr. Dorismond.

The shooting angered many New Yorkers, outrage that deepened when the mayor and the police commissioner sought to disparage the dead man by taking the rare step of releasing his sealed juvenile-offender record from years earlier. This was “no altar boy,” Mr. Giuliani said. In fact, Mr. Dorismond had once been an altar boy.

Although those episodes led to some altered policies and the reassignment of officers, Mr. Safir’s default position was to defend the department’s tactics and to dismiss his critics as political grandstanders. In the wake of the Diallo killing, he told a City Council hearing, “I believe that many of the loudest voices that we are hearing are using a tragic incident as a vehicle to attempt to undermine a police officer’s ability to conduct lawful investigations of suspected criminal activity.”

His tolerance for nonviolent protest was similarly limited. When taxi drivers, unhappy with municipal policies affecting them, slowed traffic and rallied outside City Hall, the commissioner likened them to terrorists and posted sharpshooters on nearby rooftops.

Yet his own behavior — including a penchant for filing lawsuits when aggrieved — raised eyebrows at times, such as when he assigned eight police detectives to guard his daughter’s wedding, or when he sent detectives to interrogate a woman involved in a fender-bender accident with his wife, Carol.

His ethics were notably questioned in March 1999 after he and his wife flew off to the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles while the Diallo killing still roiled New York. A Revlon executive picked up the tab. The city’s Conflicts of Interest Board later rebuked the commissioner for an appearance of impropriety, and Mr. Safir — labeled “Hollywood Howard” by the tabloids — repaid the $7,079 cost of the trip. Nonetheless, he rejected the rebuke and said he had done nothing wrong.

Howard Safir, New York’s 39th police commissioner and the only one who was Jewish, was born in the Bronx on Feb. 24, 1942, to an immigrant family from Russia that later moved to Queens and then further out on Long Island. His father, George, was a presser in the garment district; his mother, Rose (Weiner) Safir, was a switchboard operator. Howard, one of three children, earned a bachelor’s degree from Hofstra University in 1963 and attended Brooklyn Law School for two years without graduating.

While in college, he waited on tables one summer at a resort in the Poconos, where he met the teenage Carol Ferrara. They were married in 1965 and had two children, Jennifer and Adam. In addition to his son, his wife and daughter survive him, as do his sister, Elaine Siegel; his brother, Sheldon; and four grandchildren.

Mr. Safir had maintained a home in Annapolis since the 1980s — he liked to spend time there for its proximity to Washington and for the sailing, his son said — and he spent most of his time there and at another home in Manhattan.

His interest in law enforcement was piqued early on by the exploits of his maternal uncle Louis Weiner, a New York police detective who in 1952 helped capture the notorious bank robber Willie Sutton. “He was my role model,” Mr. Safir said, though Mr. Weiner had become estranged from his family at his death in 2004.

Early in his career, with a beard and long hair suited for the role, Mr. Safir was an undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration. He once shot an armed suspect who had pistol-whipped Mr. Safir’s partner.

He moved up through the ranks of the drug agency before joining the Marshals Service in 1978. There he helped capture several high-profile suspects, including Christopher J. Boyce, whose spying for the Soviet Union was recounted in the book and movie “The Falcon and the Snowman,” and Edwin P. Wilson, a rogue intelligence agent.

Mr. Safir had left government service and started his own security consulting firm when the newly elected Mayor Giuliani asked him in 1994 to become his fire commissioner. In that capacity Mr. Safir began an overhaul of an outdated system of fire-alarm boxes and supervised the Fire Department’s merger with the city’s ambulance corps, the Emergency Medical Service.

But he was regarded by firefighters as an outsider, and later he was not especially popular with police officers even though he backed them up during controversies. The officers’ union went so far as to cast a vote of no-confidence in his leadership in 1999.

After leaving the Police Department in August 2000 — he was succeeded as commissioner by Bernard B. Kerik — Mr. Safir returned to the world of security consultancy, at companies he either worked for or headed.

Throughout his time as commissioner, Mr. Safir was unapologetic about his hard-nosed tactics and his barely concealed disdain for civil libertarian critics. “People ask me about civil rights,” he said in 1998. “Well, the No. 1 civil right in my book is the right to be free from crime.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.