San Francisco's Danny Glover Files Complaint Against NY Cabs

Last Saturday in San Mateo, Danny Glover, the actor, was on a health March--walking for life and health. Glover is an actor who is also an activist. As a young College student at San Francisco State University, he was a student and a fulI time activists. He became an actor by chance, and as they say, the rest is history. But he is still an activist for theissues he wants to make a difference in. The New York cab problem is one of those issues that Glover was interested in.

On the Chris Rock Show he did his undercover NY cab driver routine, commenting that he didn't pick up Blacks either. Danny Glover filed a complaint against New York City Taxicab drivers. His complaint alleged that New York cab drivers repeatedly left him standing because he is black.

He  called a  news conference and told the nation that blacks  are being ignored by cab drivers, and that did not start with him. "It happens to countless people every single day," Glover said. "The fact that I'm a celebrity, the fact that I'm visible, allows me to draw attention to the issue."

The New York Times reported that Operation Refusal, is Mayor Giuliani's effort to stop this practice of not picking up Blacks or not taking them where they want to go, and that the Mayor, who is always ready for harsher measures to treat any public problem, held his own press conference last week. 

Giuliani told the City that he had enhanced OR with 150 police officers and taxi inspectors working undercover in multiracial groups of threes.  Glover's attorney, speaking for the actor, a former political activist at San Francisco State University when he was a student there,  criticized OR as the "wrong approach" and merely a "Band-Aid" on a persistent problem that should have been dealt with long ago.

The Mayor said, "Yeah, sure, we should have done this earlier," he said. "Probably we should have done it 3 years ago, 5 years ago, but also it would have been done 7 years ago, and 8 years ago, and 10 years ago, and 12 years ago, and 15 years ago. So, you can keep using that excuse forever. This is a good time to do it. It got a great deal of attention because it involved a person of great notoriety.[?] What we're trying to do is intensify [the operation] dramatically in order to make the point."  The driver's cab would be seized and taken to the nearest police station, where it can later be picked up, by the taxi owner or another licensed driver. "We are perfectly entitled to do this," Giuliani said. "I know we're going to get the same howls and screams and yells that we got when we did this with drunk drivers." []