In 1997 Abner Louima, a 30-year-old Haitian immigrant was at a nightclub in Brooklyn when a fight broke out. Responding to the incident, NYPD officer Justin Volpe (pictured) was punched in the face. He mistakenly identified Louima as the perpetrator and arrested him for disorderly conduct, obstructing government administration and resisting arrest.
At the scene and in the police car on the way to the station, officers including Volpe beat Louima with their fists, nightsticks and radios. Upon arriving at the station, Volpe continued the assault, kicking Louima in the testicles and brutally sodomizing him with a wooden plunger handle. Volpe then knocked out some of Louima's teeth by shoving that wooden plunger handle into his mouth.
Louima claims that there was a second officer in the room at the time of this assault and that both officers also called him a "nigger" and shouted "This is Giuliani time!" but he was forced to recant those statements in court. Volpe allegedly showed off the bloody plunger handle to fellow officers in the precinct.
When Louima was transferred to the hospital the following day, escorting officers tried to explain his injures as being the result of "abnormal homosexual activities."
Volpe would later be convicted on several assault charges and sentenced to 30 years in prison without parole. Another officer was sentenced to 15 years and three others were indicted for conspiracy to conceal it. Since that time many other incidences of brutality and civil rights violations by the NYPD have been reported, not least of which the Sean Bell slaying.
So it's entirely plausible that the NYPD failed to discover a dead body in a car, while writing it multiple parking tickets or just didn't care enough to investigate further. It's a mad, mad world we live in and sometimes the only way to cope with it is humor. Ash78 was there to help earlier today:
You mean they didn't use him for target practice, shove a plunger up his butt, then plant a gun on him? You're slipping, guys.