THE NYPD NEEDS A LITTLE GUN CONTROL

The protests go on in New York over the acquittal of the police officers accused of murder in the shooting death of African Immigrant Amadou Diallo. Diallo was shot to death in the vestibule of his New York apartment building by four white members of the NYPD’s "Street Crimes Unit" (SCU) who claim they thought he was going for a gun. When it was revealed at the scene that all poor Amadou was brandishing was his wallet, the media went berserk. Protests began almost immediately after the shooting. Movie stars, politicians and protesters lined up to get arrested outside Police Headquarters. Well-known ghoul Al Sharpton began his usual tireless round of speechifying. (If anyone ever harnesses Sharpton’s capacity for generating hot air, we could bring OPEC to its knees.)

In such an atmosphere, it’s hardly surprising that Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson overreached himself. He charged the four officers with murder, claiming, among other things, that the officers made a conscious decision to shoot Diallo as he stood outside the building.

As the trial neared, the media scrutiny became more frenzied. Diallo’s grieving mother appeared on TV more times than the guy in the CALL-ATT commercials. A Website even went up which allows viewers to examine the actual vestibule where Diallo died, zooming in and out and changing the camera angle with a mouse click. "Circus" doesn’t even begin to describe something like this. It was more like one of those sleazy sideshow exhibits purporting to show the death car of Bonnie and Clyde or something equally grotesque. Step right up, folks! SEE the actual bullet holes where the officers missed twenty-two times! SEE the actual marks made by investigators!

So things didn’t look good for the defendants in this one. However, when the verdicts were read, the score was: twenty-four charges, twenty-four acquittals.

For the record, I think the jury did the right thing. From what I’ve seen, there was little or no evidence of criminal intent. But that doesn’t mean the boys in blue don’t need to face another jury. There just need to be a few more of them in the dock next time. The Diallo shooting indicates problems throughout the whole NYPD.

Consider this: the cops fired forty-one times. They hit poor Diallo 19 times…a less than fifty percent ratio against a target trapped in an area that appears to be a little larger than a walk-in closet. To some people, that spelled savagery and what the prosecutors described as "depraved indifference" to Diallo's life. Understand, I’m not suggesting that it would have been better if they’d hit Diallo MORE times. But that doesn’t smell to me like cops with criminal intent. That death scene stinks, not of premeditation, or even of recklessness, but of panic.

These guys lost it. They freaked out. They started flinging lead like junior high nerds playing "Doom" for the first time. Now, while none of us can say for certain how we’d react in the same or similar situation, none of us are tasked with fighting street crime, either, and I hope that someone would take the time to better prepare us if we were.

The kind of Rambo-esque frenzy shown here makes you wonder who gave this "special unit" its weapons training? One report states that this supposedly "elite" group received a whole three days of extra training. It took me longer than that to learn to program the VCR.

If you’re going to send armed men out on the streets and pump them up with a lot of rhetoric about a "war" on street crime, you need to give them at least as much training as the rawest boot camp recruit gets in concepts like fire discipline. This paper made a lot of fuss a while back when a local church-based school provided students with NRA-sanctioned firearms training. Maybe we should send a few of those kids to New York to work with the SCU.

There are also disturbing indications that the Street Crime Unit used "racial profiling" to determine who was stopped and frisked. If true, a policy of viewing young black men as immediate suspects to be stopped may very well have contributed to the mindset that led the officers to assume "gun" when they saw a black man with an object in his hand.

There are two more opportunities for justice here. The Feds are making noises about a civil rights investigation, and the family is contemplating a civil suit. If that happens, I’d like to see a few more names in the Defendant list, such as that of the department that failed to train four cops how to recognize their real enemies. Instead of scapegoating four street cops as criminals, somebody needs to ask some hard questions about the system that created them.

COPYRIGHT 2000 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.