The Agony of Diallo - Black and blue in New York, again - acquittal of policemen in Amadou Diallo case - Brief Article

The acquittal of the policemen in the Diallo case was good news. The conduct of the mixed-race jury in Albany-both during and after the trial-was exemplary. And the small scale of the demonstrations that followed the verdict was gratifying, especially given the malign forces-led by Al Sharpton-calling for a conviction.

So again, good news; so good, in fact, that it's easy to forget that the shooting does raise troubling issues. An innocent man was, after all, gunned down by those entrusted with the public safety.

The Diallo disaster also makes clear that major New York institutions are unwilling or unable to come to terms with the beneficial changes the city has undergone in the last few years. The New York Times's coverage, for example, was desperate to paint the shooting as a symptom and consequence of overly aggressive, "racist" police work-as if the Koch era of brutal but ineffective policing had never ended.

And, given the panicky way the cops behaved when they saw Amadou Diallo enter his own home, one might have thought they were patrolling the vastly more dangerous Bronx of a decade ago. To be sure, the original indictment for murder rather than for manslaughter was a politically motivated travesty on the part of Bronx D.A. Robert Johnson, a man too intelligent to have believed for a moment that these four officers were cruising the city looking for a random black man to kill. The Times, in this regard, has waged a dishonest campaign-one that reeks of the paper's institutional prejudice against the white Catholic ethnics who dominate the NYPD. Even more depressing than the snobbish assumption that cops are uneducated bigots has been the attribution of significance to the fact that the police fired 41 shots at Mr. Diallo (of which 19 hit him). This number was relevant-if at all-only as circumstantial evidence that the shooting was not some kind of execution, but rather a lethally panicked response to a perceived threat, as the officers claimed. Yet, even relatively intelligent observers, such as the Times's Clyde Haberman, have assumed that it is somehow more malicious to kill someone with forty bullets than with four. It is true that there is something particularly upsetting about a corpse riddled with bullets, and the large number of rounds discharged could well imply poor fire discipline and inadequate training on the part of the cops. But the idea that you can deduce racism or cruelty from the number is absurd. Underlying the idea is a perception-drawn from films and TV-that it is possible to "shoot to wound," a notion as applicable to real life as ordering the NYPD to set its Star Trek phasers on "stun." Still, even after you have dismissed all the would- be exploiters of Amadou Diallo's death, there remains something profoundly disturbing about an innocent man being gunned down by the police in the doorway of his own home because he acted in a way the officers considered frighteningly "inappropriate." When confronted by the officers, the African immigrant took out his wallet. Perhaps he assumed, given his experience of Third World policing, that he was being asked for his papers-although showing one's ID to a police officer would not be an irrational response on anyone's part. Given that the cops were not in uniform and yet were waving guns, and that Mr. Diallo lived in a relatively dangerous area, he could even have assumed he was being robbed. We will never know. But if he had thrown himself on the ground, raised his hands above his head, and screamed for mercy, he might have survived.

That would, of course, have been a revolting picture. And many reasonable people who lack the obsessive anti-police animus of the New York Times are troubled by it. It is not enough for the department to point to statistics showing how few civilians it shoots compared with other forces. Nor should anyone be satisfied with the argument that eggs must be broken to make an omelet-the idea, in other words, that effective law enforcement requires the occasional slaying of an innocent citizen.

The officers involved will probably face the double jeopardy of a federal civil-rights inquiry; because there is little evidence to support such a case, they are unlikely to be convicted. They will also face an internal inquiry. Given that at least two of them could well have been found guilty of negligent homicide in a properly conducted criminal trial, the department would be right to discipline them severely. But if the NYPD is to avoid such catastrophes in the future, it will have to make a cultural adjustment to the new New York that is largely the creation of the department's own success. This doesn't mean abandoning policies that have worked so spectacularly. But it does mean that the police-like the New York Times-must get used to the fact that New York is no longer either a "war zone" or a "zoo."

We know that the officers who killed Mr. Diallo were in the grip of profound fear. They were right to be cautious; but it is far from clear that their instant fear of a black man in a doorway was remotely appropriate to present conditions in the Bronx. It's regrettable that the attacks on the NYPD by the Times and other critics have been so savage; they will probably result in a reflexively defiant reaction from the department, claiming that there is nothing wrong with its procedures. This is a shame, because even in a vast organization like the NYPD, tragedies like the Diallo shooting could be made less likely. (An NYPD lieutenant told me that the Street Crimes Unit grew too fast: There are too many officers with "enough experience to make them cocky, but not enough to really know what they're doing.") Because such incidents tend to take place in the poor, minority areas where the police-correctly-concentrate their efforts, they feed the Left's cartoon fantasies that the NYPD is an occupying army.