Yankee Blue said:
Wasn’t the jury allowed to consider lesser charges? I can understand the self-defense argument for murder, but you can’t use that for manslaughter or reckless endangerment, right?
Mandrake, I really don’t understand your point. I’ve been sky-diving (OK, it was a dual jump), i’ve played paint ball, i’ve done white and black-water rafting. Is this relevant?
My questions were with regard to, firstly, no handgun i’ve experienced holds 16 rounds, although, admittedly, i’ve only fired an old colt and a browning 9mm, and secondly, as far as panic/reflex situations, I thought that i’d made myself perfectly clear. Given a situation where I thought my life was in danger, i’d use deadly force, ie i’d assume that if I decided I needeed to open fire, I would have to assume that the person I was shooting would die. Otherwise, I wouldn’t open fire in the first place. What am I misunderstanding here?
Shit, I only just realised who the fuck this guy is, DNFTT, DNFTT, DNFTTT.
Why is there no web-acronym dictionary? DNFTT??
Do Not Follow This Thread?
Do Not Feed This Troll?
Do Not Fuc…
Pause…audible sound of pennies dropping…small scream in distance, slapping sound of hand covering mouth.
Leaves quietly.
Wrong, I believe. I read that self-defense was applicable to all counts, and also that in New York State law police have wider self-defense coverage than civilians (ordinary civilians have an obligation to attempt to retreat if possible before using self-defense, police are not required to do so).
Android,
In response to your question about magazine capacity. The Colt and Browning that you are familiar with are both early-generation semiauto pistols. The Colt’s 7-round and Browning’s 13-round mags are indicative of that.
Contemporary police/military handguns have magazines which are of higher capacity. The Beretta 92 has a 15-rd capacity, for example. Most cops will carry 16 by chambering the first round and reloading a new cartridge into the mag, bringing it to full capacity. When a modern handgun spec states that it can carry “15 + 1”, this is the configuration they speak of.
In regards to the Diallo incident, if 41 shots were fired between 4 officers, theoretically, no magazine changes might have occurred. The service handgun of the NYPD isn’t the Beretta, but it might be the Glock or Sig-Sauer, both of which have comparable magazine loads.
In my last stand on this soapbox, training for police officers regarding deadly force is to continue using deadly force until the threat has ceased. This is just a paraphrase for various departments actual guidelines, but the concept is universally similar. There is no magic number of rounds where we step over the threshold into excessive force, it is situational.
As far as the panic reflex situation of paintball/skydiving vis-a-vis real deadly force scenarios, I can see an analogy if the parachute had a random chance of turning into an anvil or a certain percentage of paintballs had an explosive shaped-charge instead of washable paint. These are not the Mountain Dew X-Games that we play out on the streets, they are very real and not glamorous at all. You don’t get to press “Reset” or “New Game” when you fuck up.
…send lawyers, guns, and money…
Warren ZevonI don’t know about anybody else here, but if I found myself in dark alley with a man i suspected of a violent crime, and I thought that he was reaching for a weapon, and I had a gun in my hand, I would (to quote John Tuturro from the Big Lebowski) “pull the fucking trigger til it goes click.”
Perhaps that’s why I’m not a NYC police officer. But in any event, I don’t see how the use of excessive bullets points to some kind of execution. In my mind, the fact that they unloaded on him would suggest that the bullets were fired in some kind of self-defense panic. If the cops had the intention of killing him, they would have shot him once or twice. Am I wrong about this, or is there something I’m missing?
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” -Winston Churchill
Rousseau, the problem with pulling the trigger until you hear a click is that your opponent isn’t standing up against a nice bullet-absorbing wall. Those cops had no idea what-so-ever what (or who!) lay beyond the walls he was standing next to. As far as training goes, the NYPD does NOT put their own through situational training exercises, as do a lot of other police departments.
This tragic accident was compounded by the fact that Diallo thought the policemen were Immigration Police and were coming to take him in custody to deport him. He acted suspiciously, all the while fitting the description of a rapist they were trying to arrest,and did not halt when ordered to. The rest you know. I might add, one cop stumbled and they thought he had been hit by return fire. ALL THIS ACTION HAPPENED IN SECONDS OF INTENSE KILL OR BE KILLED HORROR.
It was a very bad accident but the cops did not mean to kill an innocent man. Diallo should not be dead either
If you want real tragedy look at the Simpson trial and that racist jury.
Pas grande chose.
I have no doubt that this is true, and it would go a long way towards explaining the verdict, but why should this be so? If anything, I feel that an officer should have less self-defense coverage than the average citizen because they agree to put their lives on the line every day as part of the job. As an ordinary citizen, I do not agree to put my life in jeopardy as part of my job and should be more likely to panic in self-defense.
I am very grateful for the excellent job most police officers perform. But I would hate to live in fear of them.
I’m just guessing here, but I suppose the law allows police greater latitude for self-defense because if it did not then policemen would be legally required to back off whenever a criminal pulled a weapon.
I believe that the current system is probably necessary for effective law enforcement. Unfortunately, such tragic incidents as the Diallo shooting will probably be inevitable as long as it is necessary to arm the police. But I hope that we can at least come up with some ideas for keeping them to an absolute minimum.
My own two cents, for whatever it is worth, is that we must move towards a system where the majority of the police in a community are from the community (and in large cities I mean on a precinct by precinct basis, not just citywide). It wouldn’t eliminate such tragedies, but it may reduce the number if the police are more at home with the neighborhood in which they are stationed; and if shootings do occur, the neighborhood may be more accepting of the police explanations if they come from people not viewed as outsiders.
John John, I’m amazed. We actually agree on something.
At first I was appalled that the cops were found not guilty, but I now realize that it was a series of misunderstandings that just snowballed–from Diallo being mistaken for a rapist and acting (what they thought was) suspiciously, to the cops thinking one of their own had been shot–that led to this tragedy.
And as far as the lesser charges go and why they were found not guilty on all counts; some members of the jury were on the news tonight saying that did what they had to do in order to comply with the law and what the judges orders were, in regards to self-defense.
There are no winners in this case. The police officers have to live with this for the rest of their lives, as does the family of Amadou Diallo.
Mt. Dew habit kicked since 2/21/00!
Nebuli -
That’s a great idea in theory. But in practice it’s another thing. The very neighborhoods most in need of community policing are the same ones that no middle-class person, including a cop, wants to raise his or her family in.
In the 1980’s, Washington DC instituted a policy requiring all district employees to live in the District. For every cop/fireman/teacher who reluctantly moved their families from the 'burbs into DC, 1 or 2 quit working for the District & took similar jobs out in the suburbs. And, I seriously doubt that any of them moved to Anacostia or other slum areas.
We ask a lot of our cops. Asking them to put their families in harm’s way is not the way to attract good people to this job.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
If you want to get enraged over bad police behaviour, there are lots more egregious examples -
How about the sniper that shot Randy Weaver’s wife while she was standing in a doorway holding her infant, who was also killed by the bullet?
A few years ago there was a case where a SWAT team thought that an armed and highly dangerous fugitive was in a motel room, so they fired THROUGH THE DOOR without warning, killing an innocent man sleeping in his bed.
Then there’s Waco, and the ATF’s handling of the whole situation, starting with their propaganda-show initial ‘raid’, complete with media leaks, and continuing until the end, when they were firing tear gas into enclosed rooms containing children, even though the stuff is often fatal to children in such circumstances.
Four NY officers panicked and unloaded on an unarmed man. I don’t see murder here, but I do see godawful training of the NYPD. But this wasn’t a calculated act like the ones I mentiond above.
Dew
Not so amazing, really, but I think it’s nice. 
It’s just common sense that they did not mean to kill an innocent man. That man should still be alive, to be sure, but he added to his own fatality. It was an awful compound of mistakes, on both sides.
Someone mentioned that cops should come from the community they patrol. Good. I think black officers should be more represented in black communities. NYPD can, if it wanted to, move the present black membership of officers to patrol those communities. Do you see any problems with that? It is what black people have clamored for for decades, but if they got that I think they might yell that the white officers got the “cushy” jobs. See? Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
41 shots came, in total, from 4 automatic guns and took less than 1.5 seconds. That is very misleading.
The current situation is fair to no one.
Pas grande chose.
I do not think the 4 policemen intended to murder an innocent man. It was a tragic accident. Should they lose their jobs? Absolutely. Should they go to jail for second degree murder? No.
It was dark. A rapist was on the loose. Diallo goes back into the vestibule and reaches for something. One officer mistakes it for a weapon and fires. It echoes because it is in an enclosed area, so it sounds like two shots. The rest, thinking Diallo is shooting back, empties their guns, which is how they are trained to act.
Horrible tragedy. I can’t imagine how Diallo’s family feels. I can’t imagine how badly these officers feel for shooting an innocent man to death.
What struck me is when one officer (Sean ?) spoke of cradling Diallo’s head in his lap and telling him to hold on, hold on. Clearly, they realized they were mistaken. They didn’t try to cover up their mistake by putting a weapon in his hands, etc., because they were too busy trying to save him.
Horrible tragedy.
There’s a lesson for the policemen here. But there’s a lesson for civilians, too - COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP if confronted by a bunch of gun wielding cops.
If fewer people shot at cops every day, if fewer men came out brandishing guns and knives, maybe cops wouldn’t suffer from a trigger happy finger.
I am much more likely to see this as a tragedy than a crime.
I do, however, wonder what is the point of vilifying the victim?
I have seen that there are suspected irregularities with Diallo’s immigration papers. I have seen no evidence that Diallo was “running” from the INS. I do not remember any account by the four cops that quoted Diallo as saying “I thought you were INS.” A man pulling out his wallet is either trying to offer a mugger his money or is trying to provide identification. Assuming that the police story of proffered badges and saying the word “police” is accurate, then ID would be a legitimate alternative. So your contention is that Diallo was trying to keep from being deported by identifying himself?
The “acting suspiciously” is probably the weakest argument in the case of the police. All the police descriptions of his “suspicious” actions match the actions of a man who lives in a rough neighborhood being sure that he will not be followed into his building by thugs.
I am not willing to hang the cops. I suspect that they were brought to trial in response to public outcries rather than a straightforward review of the facts by the D.A.
Running around saying “He brought it on himself.” by imagining scenarios that were not actually described by the police sounds a lot like mentioning how tight a skirt a rape victim was wearing. What’s the point?
Tom~
Oh, for the love of Pete. YOu bleeding heart bastards (re: the OP) spend half of your time arguing that we don’t need the 2nd amendment because the police are here to protect us and the other half complaining that the police are murderers.
My wife works in a jail and the cops are continuously gettling hassled for roughing up “victims” who resist arrest.These guys fight against the cops, shout profanities and try to punch the cops They generally get injured by struggling against a hold or by trying to get out of their cuffs
How about this, when the cops are arrresting you COMPLY! What type of glue sniffing moron makes quick movements, fights against the cops or refuses to obey their commands?
Mr Z, I don’t think that Diallo fought against the cops. He reached for his wallet. Something that I have done far too many times to count. The difference is that I have never been shot 19 times. I imagine that you have done the same thing without being shot, too.
And yeah, the cops do take a lotta shit for roughing up perpetrators. And sometimes they deserve to take that shit. I have watched as someone was taken to the ground for daring to ask why he had been stopped. In that case, those bastards deserved to be taken to task. I don’t know if they were, though. Part and parcel of the job is that you will often be dealing with members of society who will do whatever they can to get under your skin. A constable needs to realize that, and deal with it when it happens.
Waste
Flick Lives!
Zambezi, you’re also assuming that he knew they were cops. If I’m in NYC and an unmarked car starts following me, I get suspicious and try and make it into my place ASAP. They didn’t identify themselves as police officers until right before he was shot and at that point he was reaching for his wallet for identification.
IMO, it definitely wasn’t 1st degree murder.