I guess that it all boils down to a choice.
Should the public be taught how to deal with the police, or should the police be taught how to deal with the public?
White police officers do not stop blacks more than whites because they are racist. Rather, the white cops stop more blacks because they’ve been programmed in school, growing up, and mostly on tv, that blacks commit more crimes than whites.
True or not true, that’s the fact.
R.J.D.
Majormd:
I am always very cautious when approached by a police officer who doesn’t know me personally. I keep my hands in plain sight and avoid any sudden moves. I don’t view that as being oppressed, only as acting with common sense. Since I don’t believe in clairvoyance or telepathy, how can I expect a stranger, whose job entails exposure to many potential dangers, to know what is on my mind?
Slythe:
Definitely both. I am not maintaining that the manner in which the officers approached Amadou Diallo was correct; I have been maintaining that the prosecution failed to prove that it was criminal.
That is not exactly what I said.What I was getting at was that the assertion that Diallo was targeted solely because he was a lone black male has no supporting evidence (of course that hasn’t prevented our Politician in Chief from reaching the conclusion). There were many potential cases which could have supported such a conclusion if they had occurred; they did not. The Diallo case is a sample of one. To state dogmatically why it occurred requires faith or presupposition- insufficient evidence exists to reach the stated conclusion.
upstatic said
Um… that sounds like a kind of racism to me…
Anyway, I suspect this was as much a case of plainclothes police forgetting that, in plainclothes, they look as much like mobsters as like cops; as it was a case of a non-native missing something (or had he lived in NYC long?)
I don’t think officers in such a situation need to be convicted of a felony; nor even that they be permanently removed from the force. But the City of New York should acknowledge that a wrong was done–albeit, perhaps, due to honest error–and compensate his family for it.
Anyone know what wergeld means? [incomplete & probably slightly inaccurate explanation]It’s a concept from Old English (pre-Norman) law. It’s also used in Islamic law. See, if you murder somebody, that’s a crime, and vengeance can be taken. If you cause someone’s death by your actions, so you’re responsible, even though you bore him no malice, and didn’t intend to kill him, you owe his family a sum of geld–money–a standard sum determined by law and convention.[/incomplete & probably slightly inaccurate explanation] I don’t think there’s any form of that in the USA. Our courts seem to think that manslaughter is just a “lesser felony,” which doesn’t help much.
I’m not saying that paying off the family is the morally right thing to do–but what such customs serve to do is to say, “No, it wasn’t murder, but yes, this person was at fault.” And it seems like US law & the American people don’t know how to deal with that nuance.
So we get people saying the cops must have been right, and blameless, which sounds like a whitewash; or that they were murderers, which ascribes a malice not there.
I’m a member of the Monarchist political party.
Foolsguinea - Because the four police men were found not guilty of murder does not mean that they won’t be found liable for monetary damages in a civil suit. Much like O.J. was found liable for monetary damages in the murder of his wife in the civil suit but was found not guilty of first degree murder in the criminal courts.
In fact, I find it highy improbable that the cops, and/or the city, will NOT pay a substantial amount of money to Diallo’s family. It’s pretty much a prima facie example of negligent, if not reckless, behavior to have an unarmed, innocent man shot to death.
So while I’ll argue that the cops shouldn’t be sent to jail for the accidental shooting, an innocent man is dead and they owe his family something more than a “Gee, I’m sorry.”
BTW, have they ever said they were sorry to Diallo’s family?
Oh come on, Mr.Zambezi. You’re an intelligent poster. Don’t insult us with this moronic nonsense.
Nothing ran through the cops minds. They blasted away, because of poor judgement, panic, lack of training, whatever.
When it was over, all they had to do was stick to their story:
We thought he had a gun.
He made a sudden movement.
We were in fear of our lives.
The ironic thing is, the above three statements are very probably true. What’s at issue here is that these fucking stupid cowboys should never have been cops in the first place.
For that I blame them, for not using any common sense, (if they had any), and the department, for providing lousy training and selecting unsuitable candidates for the force.
And they are unsuitable. Would like these assholes to patrol your neighbourhood?
Perhaps that last comment would be better addressed to Robert Johnson, Bronx DA, who brought intentional murder charges against all four officers. If, instead of doing the politically expedient thing, he had brought and prosecuted appropriate charges he might have gotten one or two negligent homicide convictions, or at least reckless endangerment convictions.
Your points are probably valid for one of the policemen, and possibly for a second. But consider the circumstances for the other two [with everything happening within a few seconds]:
a partner yells “He’s got a gun”;
the partner falls down;
echos and richochets coming back from the vestibule make it seem as if gunfire is coming from the vestibule;
one policeman fires four shots, the other fires five IIRC -I’m not certain of the exact number, but he didn’t come close to emptying his clip.
Without superhuman perspicacity, or incredibly slow reflexes, how could those two officers be expected to react otherwise? I don’t believe all the training or screening in the world could change that.
The tactics the four used in approaching Diallo immediately prior to the incident are certainly open to criticism- but that should be direct to the police administration who implemented the procedures calling for those tactics.
Looking at it from Diallo’s side for a moment:
He’s black, he’s poor, he’s living in a dangerous neighborhood. None of these things are his fault.
One night, four unidentified white men jump out of an ordinary car and point guns at him as he stands in the vestibule of his building. How can he be expected to act one way or another? He’s going to act out of fear. He’s going to move in unpredictable ways. Not his fault.
They holler out that they’re the police and he should get his hands up. Under the pressure of the moment, he reaches for his wallet, presumably to show some ID. (What other reason would there have been?) Hard to blame him for that, either.
The cops pump him full of bullets. He dies.
This is the upsetting thing about the Diallo case: Diallo was acting blamelessly, and if the cops were acting properly, then correct police procedures killed an innocent man, closing in on this man’s life like a vise and crushing it.
How can it be that the police do more or less what’s ‘right’, Diallo does more or less what’s ‘right’, yet Diallo winds up dead? Feel free to call me a bleeding heart, but that’s not ‘right’. What it says is that, occasionally, the life of an innocent person must be sacrificed in order that the police may achieve their nightly goal of surviving their shift in one piece. Is that a reasonable price? I don’t think so.
Maybe the four cops who killed Diallo weren’t personally to blame; maybe they and Diallo both were trapped in a fundamentally unreasonable situation. Now the buck is passed back to those who have some responsibility for the situation.
Will Guiliani simply pat his boys in blue on the back and tell them to keep on doin’, or will he ask how tragedies like this one might be averted in the future? Will he ask why there aren’t enough blacks on the force so that a four-man squad in a black ghetto was all white? Will he use this incident as an opportunity to ask for more funds to recruit and train blacks for the force, or for more community-based policing, or for other more hopeful responses than having the police always be a new set of white strangers who suddenly appear in the neighborhood, then equally suddenly disappear?
This is where we get to see racism or its absence: in whether this sort of thing matters to mayors, police chiefs, and the like. If the Diallo incident is looked on as an unfortunate event, but with no point in even looking for lessons in the tragedy, then the local powers are treating people like Diallo as expendable, rather than as people.