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HAVE WE REALLY COME THAT FAR SINCE AMADOU DIALLO?
Last week a judge acquitted the three NYPD officers who fired 50 shots into an unarmed man, Sean Bell, outside a Queens nightclub in 2006. Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a story about how some black New Yorkers "saw the case through a prism not of race, but of police conduct." The article quotes a few different people who say this is different than other high-profile cases of police violence against unarmed black men, such as when cops fired 41 shots at an unarmed Amadou Diallo as he stood in his doorway in 1999. This isn't Giuliani's New York any more, they say, things are different now.
Here's Ta-Nehisi Coates reacting to the Times article:
I make no brief for the cops in the Sean Bell case here, but we have to acknowledge that, as tragic this was, as stupid and incredibly incompetent as the cops behaved, this isn't the same town, and this isn't the same sort of incident. But that doesn't mean that there is no price to be paid. I just wonder--as the judge argued--whether the court was the place to deal with that.
Then there's the fact that two of the three officers involved in the shooting are black men. I'll defer to dnA on this one:
I'm sure there are more than a few people out there who would argue that black officers pulling the trigger proves that the incident wasn't racially motivated.Sadly, that's just not the case
The racist attitudes of a police department can and do affect black officers almost as much as they do white officers. The reason for that doesn't really have anything to do with self-hatred on the part of the black officers, or at least in many cases I don't think it does. The fundamental root of the issue isn't so much a departmental policy that says that white people are good and black people are bad as it is a departmental policy that says that young black males are a problem to be contained. A threat to be aware of, and to be neutralized if necessary.
Of course, I'm speaking as a white woman who doesn't live in New York, but this seems spot-on to me. Yeah, the NYPD may have undergone some changes since the Giuliani years. Yeah, two of the three cops were black. But the Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo cases don't seem to be worlds apart.
--Ann Friedman
UPDATE: Kai Wright has more.
COMMENTS (6)
I don't see this awful incident as symptomatic of anything unique to the NYPD. This kind of thing can (and does) happen in all over the US.
IMHO NYC has generally excellent police and policing relative to other US cities. It's just that NYC is the the media capital of the world and every bad incident (and this was certainly very bad) gets major attention.
For context, there's been 290 Taser-related deaths involving the Police in the US since 2001. The idea that the NYPD uniquely lacks restraint just doesn't seem to hold water, especially in light of the crime statistics in NYC.
Effective policing strategies and head-cracking shoot 'em up style policing usually DON'T go hand in hand. NYC has lower crime than just about any major city in the US so I think there is a bit of media distortion about the big bad NYPD.
If the NYPD is troubled, what PD in the US are you holding up as good?
Posted by: joejoejoe | April 29, 2008 10:08 AM
Agree with joe^3 above. The NYPD has improved greatly even over just the last 10 years. And their issues with out-of-control officers doesn't approach that of the LAPD (the gold standard in this area), or the corruption-rife Chicago PD.
Posted by: dry_fish | April 29, 2008 10:58 AM
First off, I don't think you can overestimate what a difference it makes that two of the three officers were African-American. Yes, systemic racism in the PD matters a lot, but it changes the media dynamic considerably when it's not just white cops killing black men.
Secondly, as Coates says, Bloomberg was very quick on the draw in meeting with community leaders and setting up review boards, so that even if the officers were aquitted, people would still feel like the city was taking action. It helps, too, that he's not Gulianni, who could never conceal his plain and simple loathing of black people.
Finally, I think the facts of the case made a difference. A lot of New Yorkers who were outraged about a guy being shot dead while walking in his own door (Diallo), or worse yet, being entrapped (Dorismond) weren't quite so outraged about a couple guys who got belligerent with the cops. No one thinks what happened was right, but it's just not quite such a cut-and-dried case of out of control white cops shooting an innocent black guy.
Posted by: That Fuzzy Bastard | April 29, 2008 11:05 AM
In "Giuliani's New York," there were less people shot by police than in Dinkins' New York.
Posted by: CMR | April 29, 2008 11:09 AM
CMR's right, actually---a potent reminder of what a lousy mayor Dinkins was, as he was completely unable to get the NYPD under control. Gulianni, by contrast, didn't try to get them under control---there was nothing an officer could do to a black man that would merit disciplinary procedures---but crime dropped enough that there were fewer police shootings, which is a real accomplishment.
Indeed, considering that he brought about the first drop in black men being killed in decades, Gulianni could've been remembered as the best mayor the black community's ever had. Except that he obviously hated black people---he made a point of never doing even the superficial photo ops with black community leaders that all politicians do, and could never muster even token sympathy when, say, children were killed by police just for biking past the scene of an arrest.
Posted by: That Fuzzy Bastard | April 29, 2008 11:27 AM
I really don't get the 50 bullet executions, and I never did, and I'm *glad* that this one is being framed more as a matter of style of policing rather than the racial polarization we got last time. Although legitimate, I think it needlessly ran up white defensiveness (yes, it's not for the South and rural PA and other assorted white trash alone!) on something all civilians should have agreed on for their own safety.
I'm also not picking on the cops, but I *really, really* find this whole notion that we're supposed to effectively surrender ourselves to plain clothes officers (in the middle of the night, especially), completely implausible. I would have got in my car and tried to drive away, too.
So, they're going to have to make it a priority to balance their undercover work with public safety. Period.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 29, 2008 1:33 PM