Pubdate: Thu, 30 Nov 2006
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2006 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Bob Herbert
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Sean+Bell
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Amadou+Diallo
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?246 (Policing - United States)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/author/Bob+Herbert

BADGES, GUNS AND ANOTHER UNARMED VICTIM

This time it was 50 shots from five officers. With Amadou Diallo it 
was 41 shots from four officers. With Eleanor Bumpurs, an aging, 
overweight, disoriented grandmother, it was a pair of shotgun blasts 
from a single officer -- inside her apartment!

The decades pass. The stories remain the same. Nathaniel Gaines Jr., 
a 25-year-old Navy veteran, was shot to death by a cop on a subway 
platform in the Bronx on the Fourth of July in 1996. The mayor at the 
time, Rudolph Giuliani, no softy on crime, said of the shooting: 
"There does not seem to be any reason for it."

On an April morning in 1973 a veteran cop named Thomas Shea pulled 
his service revolver and blew away a black kid on a street in 
Jamaica, Queens. There was no reason on God's glittering earth for 
that killing. The kid, Clifford Glover, was 10 years old. The cop 
shot him in the back.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1976 an officer named Robert Torsney fired a 
bullet into the head of Randolph Evans, 15, outside a housing project 
in Brooklyn. No one could explain that killing, either.

Yesterday, under an overcast sky and with a crush of reporters around 
them, the relatives and fiancee of Sean Bell visited the narrow 
street in Queens where he was killed in a sudden frantic fusillade of 
police bullets early last Saturday morning, just a few hours before 
he was to be married.

Mr. Bell and two friends who had attended his bachelor party at a 
nearby club were in his car when they were set upon by a group of 
undercover cops who had been staking out the club. The two friends 
were seriously wounded in the shooting.

Here is my first quick take on this case: If I was in my car outside 
a rowdy nightclub in the wee hours of the morning and someone who 
looked like a club patron came running toward me, screaming and 
waving a gun, I would immediately slam the gearshift into drive, hit 
the accelerator and try to get the hell out of there.

This appears to be what happened. The cops, dressed to blend in with 
the club crowd, were single-mindedly looking for trouble -- evidence 
of prostitution, underage drinking, illegal guns, and so forth. They 
were looking so hard for criminal behavior that they seem to have 
imagined it where none was occurring.

One officer is said to have believed that one of Mr. Bell's 
companions may have had a gun. No gun was found and there is no 
evidence that any of the three men were armed at any time.

"It sounds to me like excessive force was used," said Mayor Michael 
Bloomberg, who characterized the 50-shot barrage as "unacceptable" 
and "inexplicable." Referring to Mr. Bell and his two friends, the 
mayor said, "There is no evidence that they were doing anything wrong."

The thing that is most unacceptable about this case is not the total 
number of shots fired, but the fact that five New York City cops were 
so willing to begin firing at all -- willing to take the life of 
another human being, and maybe a number of human beings -- without 
ever establishing that there was a good reason for doing so.

Under Mayor Bloomberg, there is a much better tone in the city with 
regard to police-community relations, and race relations in general. 
But when it comes to the Police Department, an improved tone won't 
count for much if policies and procedures aren't changed to prevent 
cops from blowing away innocent individuals with impunity.

This has gone on for far too many decades. Yet there is still no 
sense among public officials that big changes are necessary. The cops 
who killed Sean Bell and wounded his two friends haven't even been 
questioned yet by the police or investigators from the Queens 
district attorney's office. The D.A., Richard Brown, is preparing a 
grand jury investigation but he told me it could still be weeks 
before the cops are questioned.

Meanwhile, the community, which is sick of these killings, is 
simmering. Along with the candles and flower arrangements that have 
been placed at the site of the shooting were bitter signs denouncing 
"police murder" and, in some instances, calling for violence.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who represents the Bell family, has publicly 
called for patience and calm. But he added, and I agree, that the 
mayor and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have an obligation to develop 
effective new strategies for reining in reckless police behavior.

The crucial first step, in my opinion, is to insist that police 
officers, including those who are black, recognize the essential 
humanity of all the people they are supposed to be protecting and 
serving. Not everyone with dark skin is a perp. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake