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Mort de Amadou Diallo à New York City

Clyde Haberman
A Shooting, and Shooting From the Hip

New York Times — February 12, 1999

Remember « it's Giuliani time » ?

That, we were told, is what police officers snarled while allegedly torturing Abner Louima in a Brooklyn precinct house 18 months ago. The incendiary phrase shot across the city like a rocket-propelled grenade. Only problem: Louima later acknowledged that it was never said.

Remember Jose (Kiko) Garcia? He was the Dominican immigrant shot to death by a police officer in Washington Heights seven years ago. Two sisters told how he was beaten, then shot while lying helpless on the floor. There were nights of street unrest. Only problem: Garcia turned out to be an armed drug suspect. A grand jury found the sisters' story to be untrue, and said the officer had acted in self-defense.

Remember Kevin Cedeno?

He was the Washington Heights teen-ager shot in the back by a police officer in 1997. There was outrage then, too. The Bronx Borough President, Fernando Ferrer, called the shooting "an execution." Only problem: Cedeno was carrying a two-foot-long machete that a grand jury decided could have been mistaken for a shotgun about to be fired.

In short, things are not always what they seem at first, a truism that can be forgotten in times of passion. But it seems worth bearing in mind in the stomach-wrenching death of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed African immigrant gunned down in the Bronx by four police officers who fired an almost inconceivable 41 bullets at him.

No one is suggesting that Diallo did anything to warrant such a response, and it is obvious that something went terribly wrong. But charged words like « murderers, » « massacre » and « execution » have been casually tossed around in street protests, which seem likely to continue.

While the anger is understandable, it is unclear how anyone can reach such damning conclusions based on the available evidence. Who knows at this point if the four officers had malice in their hearts or if they panicked in the face of an illusory threat they thought to be real? It does make a difference.

As horrified as everyone is by those 41 shots, a more enduring question for New Yorkers may be why Bullet No. 1 was fired. Until a grand jury weighs in, something that takes time and a smidgen of public patience, answers may remain out of reach, no matter how many protests are held.

« This wasn't target practice, » said James Savage, acting president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.

But Savage is well aware that skeptics will not take him at face value, especially in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The same can be said of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir, who are now paying the price for mechanistic responses to questionable police shootings.

Odd as the comparison may seem, it is hard not think back a few years to the intifada, the Palestinians' anti-Israel uprising.

When Palestinians raged against military occupation, Israeli officials responded with sheaves of figures showing how life was better under their rule. Education levels were up, infant mortality was down and so on. The statistics were accurate. But they took no account of the humiliations, large and small, that Palestinians felt every day at the hands of the Israeli Army.

Mr. Giuliani offers statistics in much the same way, to show that his police do not generally have an itchy trigger finger and that a plunging murder rate has kept thousands of black and Hispanic New Yorkers alive. But his numbers, however accurate, cannot reflect the anger felt by people stopped and frisked by the police each day only because they are W.W.B. — Walking While Black.

Humiliation is hard to quantify. So is the Mayor's resistance to apologizing when things go wrong — unless perhaps for something that happened on his predecessor's watch, like the Crown Heights disturbances.

« Nobody has saved more blacks and Hispanics from violence than Mayor Giuliani, and yet he is painted as a racist, » said Michael Julian, a former senior official in the Police Department. That, he said, is because the Mayor has done little to break the wagons-in-a-circle mentality of most officers. He may have even made it worse.

« Cops are intolerant of critics, and now they have an administration like that, » Julian said. « It has an effect on how minorities react. » If the Mayor and the police had only shown more empathy over the years, he said, « they might have had more support now that they really need it. »