I could not believe it. Amadou would not be involved with police. No, I don't believe it. It was hard to understand. Even now when I think back, it is just something that you cannot imagine unless it happens to you.
With an emotional scream, she called for her son, "Amadou, Amadou," as she arrived on Wheeler Avenue. She remembers little about that day she came from Guinea to the spot in the Bronx where her son took his last breath. She said she was numb and distraught. The horrifying details of the unarmed, innocent man's death lead to massive protests, civil disobedience and arrests in The Bronx, at Police Headquarters and on Wall Street. The officers' attorneys successfully argued they couldn't get a fair trial in the city because of all of the publicity and rallies.
He recalls a young man shot to death in April inside a Brooklyn movie theater. Mubarak Abdul-Jabbar, now a transit coordinator for the police union, came up to the Bronx courthouse one windy morning in March to support the Diallo officers. Are the police targeting minorities? I ask him. No one wants to admit the facts," he adds, "that in black and Latino communities, senior citizens have to stay inside.
In early May, the bulletin board at the Street Crime Unit headquarters notified officers of the following series of armed robberies in the Bronx:. These descriptions will be just the starting point for further observation and crime-pattern analysis. A broad-chested Street Crime Unit member from a family of police officers explains some possible additional guides.
Which is worse—stopping four innocent people on the basis of reasonable suspicion to make one arrest, or not making the arrest at all? A preliminary analysis of stop-and-frisk records in over 20 precincts last year disproves the charge that the police single out minorities for investigation. In fact, police frisk blacks at a lower rate than their representation in I. Victims identified 71 percent of their assailants as black, but only 63 percent of all people frisked were black and only 68 percent of all arrestees were black.
Since the majority of crime is committed by minorities against minorities, inevitably the subjects of frisks will be minorities, too.
I n talking to city residents about the police, the Times found only resentment and suspicion. Noting that some residents doubted whether they could reduce crime and drug dealing on their own, the article quickly added: "These residents are not police boosters,. The Times noted that these non-police boosters were worried "over well-publicized reports of brutality against. It also long predates the Giuliani administration.
But though this animus toward the police still exists, it is accompanied by goodwill in the very communities where the animus is thickest. One April afternoon, Dave Rivera was basking in the bright sun and smoking a cigarette on Elder Avenue, drug-infested until recently. Rivera has lived on the block for 25 years and works as superintendent in the building across the street.
The model block program? If you be too nice. Across the street, a slender year-old with sunken cheeks and a red bandana around his head is leaning against a chain-link fence. M any people will find this law-and-order view naive. But naive or not, it has many proponents among minorities. Mario has come to a community meeting at the 43rd Precinct, where the Diallo shooting occurred, to ask the police to clean up a drug problem in his neighborhood. Does he think the police harass people?
A constant Times theme was that people had "exchange[d] the fear of crime for a fear of the police," as an April 2 editorial solemnly charged. Are the police racist? We have very good officers. When they come into the neighborhood, we talk, so they know they are there to help them.
This view has advocates even on Wheeler Avenue, where Amadou Diallo was shot. I t turns out the Times had to work pretty hard to avoid people like this. A recent Justice Department study found that 77 percent of New York City blacks approve of the police, an astoundingly high number, considering the relentless anti-police propaganda of activists and the press. The Times tried desperately to neutralize this refutation of its own coverage by playing up the paltry 12 percent gap between black and white approval ratings.
Sharit Sherrod, a year-old inventory specialist, is standing in line at the 43rd Precinct to report a stolen car. A lot of my friends start cursing, but the way I look at it, the cops carry guns. Sherrod is onto something. While there is no justification for the police treating peaceful citizens hostilely or rudely, police-citizen relations are a two-way street.
Two studies for the National Institute of Justice found that citizens are more inclined to show the police disrespect than vice versa, and that the most powerful predictor of police disrespect is a citizen being disrespectful first. The nonstop coverage of the Diallo shooting has already increased the taunts thrown at the police on the street, escalating tensions. N o claim of police harassment seemed incredible to the Times.
A troubling article told of police harassment of students at Rice High School, a Catholic school; one boy alleged that an officer had accused him of personally knitting the school sweater vest he was wearing in order to pass as a student.
Perhaps every teen regaling reporters with his police ordeals tells only the gospel truth, but on the streets you hear skepticism about such accounts. Then the police react. John Vargas, a hospital financial investigator and president of the community council in the 43rd Precinct, greets many police-harassment stories with similar skepticism. People will always say this and that, but when you ask for concrete information, they walk away.
A recent claimant to police-victim status shows how tenuous such claims can be. It turns out the police never laid a finger on Jovan. But the "racist gang" who did beat him up has "ties," Ms.
Gonzalez claimed, to the 47th Precinct. Gonzalez has already entered popular lore as a police victim; no one has ever asked for proof of the involvement of the 47th precinct. The Times neglected to report that the motto frames a silhouette of an old lady bent over a cane; the unit proudly asserts supremacy over thugs it unapologetically views as evil, in order to protect the helpless. Fearless of self-contradiction, the Times played up the claim that racism causes the police to ignore crime against ghetto residents, even as it trumpeted claims that the police were too aggressive in trying to get guns out of the ghetto.
A February 17 article quoted minority women who complained that the police were ignoring the serial rapist terrorizing the Bronx and upper Manhattan. If a white woman is attacked, the police are all over the case, complained a West Harlem community advocate, but "when we have year-old girls beaten and raped, nobody comes to do anything. They might care if this was the Upper West Side. The Street Crime Unit had gone to the 43rd Precinct precisely to track down the rapist; had the rapist not been out there, Diallo probably would still be alive.
Starting with Irby, the projects will appear once a month. Diallo, 23, was shot 19 times in the doorway of his Bronx apartment on the morning of Feb.
They began shooting, they said later in court, because they thought a wallet Diallo held to offer identification was a gun. The officers fired 41 shots in total at the unarmed man. The killing inspired a protest song by Bruce Springsteen, but the officers, who had been charged with second-degree murder, were acquitted.
LEAP, DuVernay says, is meant to not just remind people of past cases, but also to name the police officers involved in the shootings of Black people and hold them accountable. Irby: The reason I chose to have the sun kind of glaring by the doors and being a little bit brighter kind of shows the duality of the neighborhood.
This is not different from where anybody else lives. People still live there. In , when her younger cousin was killed, Aissatou was new to the Bronx, living on the second floor of the same apartment building as Amadou. At the time of the shooting, she was a few months pregnant and in Georgia visiting family.
Imagining her cousin sprawled and dying on the lobby floor, she fainted. Since its founding, the Amadou Diallo Foundation has given scholarship aid to 30 students of African descent or who have immigrated to the U.
And while she says meeting and working with students has helped her heal, memories of February 4, , remain. One mother cautions her grade school-age sons to always take their hands out of their pockets when they pass the police. Her oldest, born the year Amadou died, will turn 20 in August. Beyond its effect on African immigrants, the Diallo killing — and the eventual acquittal of the four white police officers who shot him — clawed open a nasty abscess in New York.
Among the many feelings that oozed out was rage over the response from the city, led by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to the shooting. City of New York. And last year, city legislators passed the Right to Know Act , which mandated that police officers must identify themselves during stops.
A report from then-state attorney general Eliot Spitzer found that between January and March , the SCU made more stops than any other single, non-precinct-based command.
More than 60 percent of those stopped were black. But problems persist. Since , more than people have been killed by NYPD officers, according to Police Department records and criminal justice reform groups.
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