By DEEPTI HAJELA, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK- The similarities are striking: A young black man dies in a hail of police bullets, and when the chaos clears it turns out he was unarmed.
When 23-year-old Sean Bell was killed last weekend by officers who fired 50 shots, it brought to mind other police shootings, including another 23-year-old _ Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant shot to death by four white police officers in 1999 in the entrance to his apartment building. Diallo was struck by 19 of the 41 bullets fired at him.
Other killings of black men by police in New York also have provoked controversy, but there was a difference this time _ while Bell and his two companions were black, the five officers were black and Hispanic as well as white.
But advocates and legal experts say that doesn’t mean the shooting wasn’t affected by race; it just makes it more difficult to talk about in a society that thinks of race literally in black and white terms.
“It doesn’t matter what color cop it is,” said Michael Meyers, the executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. “The overwhelming number of victims of questionable police shootings have been young black men.”
“There’s a perception that black male youth are more dangerous, more violent and more likely to be armed than their white counterparts,” said activist lawyer Ron Kuby. “That concern about young black men permeates the police department and results in police shooting black youth under circumstances where they would not shoot white people.”
Bell was buried Saturday. After his burial, the New Black Panther Party organized a “March of Outrage” that wound its way from the strip club where he was shot to a police precinct.
While race plays a role, it’s not the only issue that needs to be looked at, Kuby and other legal experts said. Police need to have serious conversations about violence and force, and also get better training in ways to deal with tense situations, experts say.
“The training issue is a big issue,” said Karen Blum, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. “Even if you took race out of this picture, these officers were not trained well in how to respond in this kind of situation.”
Black people around the country have long felt targeted by law enforcement, whether it’s black drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike, or in communities anywhere from Los Angeles to Cincinnati. The Atlanta Police Department is currently under criticism for the killing of an elderly black woman last month by narcotics officers.
Minority police officers are not immune from perceptions and stereotypes, said Joe Feagin, a professor of sociology at Texas A&M University.
“Even if you’re an officer of color, you’re in a whitewashed world,” he said. Those officers, Feagin said, may see black people as more dangerous than white people.
City Councilman Charles Barron, a longtime critic of how communities of color are policed, put it more strongly: “The complexion of the individual on the force doesn’t change the fact that they’re all blue. And blue in New York City means racist practices against the black and Latino community.”
Police and city officials deny such claims, and tout the fact that the NYPD has become much more diverse since the Diallo shooting.
“We think we’ve made great strides but obviously there are people ... who think this was racially motivated,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this week. “I don’t think that was the case, but it’s clear that people in this city do feel that they are sometimes stopped, frisked, whatever, based on their ethnicity. That is totally unacceptable and we’ll continue to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
Members of the New York Police Department, the nation’s largest with more than 37,000 uniformed officers, have killed 11 people this year, while at least 19 people have been killed by police in Philadelphia with 12 in Las Vegas, which has about 2,170 officers. Police have killed 12 people so far this year in suburban Atlanta’s DeKalb County, which with 700,000 residents is one-tenth the size of the New York City.
The Miami police department overhauled its use-of-force policies several years ago and says it has had no fatal shootings by its officers this year.
Officials are still examining the latest shooting, which happened on Nov. 25 after Bell and his friends left a strip club where he had been having a bachelor party the night before his wedding. Police have said that Bell’s vehicle hit one officer and an unmarked police car, and officers apparently thought one of Bell’s companions was about to get to a gun.
Critics say the use of force was not justified.
“It is not just about black or white,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton. “For police to shoot with no just cause is why we’re here.”
Sharpton acknowledged that the less-obvious involvement of race in this incident changed how people are talking about it, and have made it more difficult to talk about.
That is because “America is so stuck in this black-white binary,” said Camille Nelson, an associate professor at St. Louis University’s law school. “The Diallo case was less nuanced because it was stark. ... It’s not always going to be so simple.”