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Diallo is a martyr, but the cops aren't murderers | page 1, 2
Interestingly, when Commissioner Safir offered to let some of those most critical of the NYPD try out some of these tests, they almost all declined, having no interest in knowing what kinds of pressures and decisions a cop has to make out there. There are other things such people aren't interested in. In New York, from 1991 to 1996, 4,840 black people were murdered by civilians while 82 were killed in police shootings; 1136 Hispanics were murdered and 57 lost their lives in police actions; 227 Asians were victims of homicide while two died at the hands of the cops. No professional "voices of the Third World," like Norman Siegel of the New York Chapter of the ACLU, have disputed those numbers. Such people have not been particularly interested in organizing marches and protests against the crimes citizens themselves suffer at the hands of criminals. If Diallo had been killed while caught in a cross-fire as rival drug dealers or gang bangers opened up on each other and accidentally shot him almost 20 times, he might have gotten a day or two in the press. There would have been no Rev. Al Sharpton, no huge protests, no coverage of his mother and father. But that is not how Diallo died, and how he did die led to certain predictable reactions from police critics. Even so, I was as surprised as everybody else when the verdict came down in Albany, and the four cops walked. But this was no case of a change of venue leading a faraway jury to acquit cops New Yorkers would have found guilty. Arlene Taylor, the black woman who was the jury foreman, is from the Bronx. And Taylor says to those who don't like the verdict: "Tough." It was not a racial case as far as she, the other three black women and the rest of the jury were concerned. They did not believe that those men started moving toward Diallo with the intention of shooting, wounding or killing him. In fact Robert Johnson, the black district attorney in the Bronx who brought the charges against the cops, has told his critics that the prosecution didn't emphasize race in the Diallo case because he and his colleagues didn't believe race was relevant to what the cops did wrong. And while disappointed in the verdict, Johnson made the point -- correctly -- that he didn't build his case to satisfy his critics in the streets. To his credit, Al Sharpton discouraged protesters from violence, saying such action would betray Diallo's memory, and urged them to take the long march to justice. For all his flimflam, voluminous smoke and endless mirrors, Sharpton is a brilliant and complex man. He cut his feet off during the Tawana Brawley hoax, though, and the stumps have not carried him forward very well, especially with the press. But the media is not interested in the better angels of his nature, having ignored one of New York's most important moments of racial healing, sponsored by Sharpton. Last year he brought together Keith Mondello and Moses Stewart. Mondello was one of the white kids who mobbed and killed Yusef Hawkins, a young black man who came into their neighborhood to look into buying a used car that had been advertised in the newspaper; Stewart was Hawkins' father. Mondello apologized to Stewart for having been one of the people who killed his son. But hardly a whisper was raised about this in the media, which means that news people are more interested in maintaining Sharpton as a purveyor of racial division rather than healing. But all of these incidents, when looked at more than superficially, force us to reckon with the complexities of our society, the give and take, push and resistance, that mark the movement from murk to clarity. As a result of Diallo's killing, the Street Crimes Unit the four cops were part of has been disbanded and its members dispersed throughout the NYPD. At the Police Academy, the torture of Abner Louima and the death of Amadou Diallo have created the desire to do a much better job, however remarkable the overall performance of the police has been as crime has declined for the last five or six years. It is too bad that some things come about this way, but there is, quite often, a sacrificial element to the expansion of civilization. Society often cleanses itself in the blood of martyrs. That Diallo could be a martyr without his killers' being murderers is probably too complex a concept for the purveyors of racial division to recognize.
- - - - - - - - - - - - Table Talk Sound off Related Salon stories Brutal verdict Behind the acquittal of four officers is a clear indictment of standard police procedure in Giuliani's New York. The beating goes on Just another acquittal of police officers who killed a black man. I'm angry, but I'm not surprised. How will the acquittal play in the Giuliani-Clinton Senate race? "Let's move this out of politics," the mayor says. Fat chance, when his opponent's husband gets to decide whether federal civil rights laws apply.
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