NEWS > 02 December 2006

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International Herald Tribune -
02 December 2006

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Race called complicated, 'cove

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, it brought to mind another 23-year-old � Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant shot to death by four white police officers in 1999. And there have been others killed by police in controversial circumstances, including Patrick Dorismond, Ousmane Zongo and Timothy Stansbury.

One difference, though, was that the officers involved in the latest shooting were not just white. They were black and Hispanic, too. City officials have pointed to that in refuting any element of race in the shooting, the circumstances of which are still under investigation.

"The police officers were as diverse as the people in the car, and I don't think there's any evidence that race had anything to do with this," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said after the shooting.

But advocates and legal experts say that does not mean the shooting wasn't affected by race; it just makes it more difficult to talk about in a society that thinks of race in literally 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."

But while race plays a role, it is not the only issue that needs to be looked at, he and other legal experts said. Police need to have serious conversations about violence and force, and also get better training in how 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 America have long felt targeted by law enforcement, whether it is 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.

And 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.

Officials are still examining the shooting, which happened in the early morning hours of Nov. 25 when Bell and his friends were leaving a Queens 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.

Those leading the community response to the shooting have said the use of force was not justified.

"It is not just about black or white," said Al Sharpton. "For police to shoot with no just cause is why we're here."

Sharpton, talking to The Associated Press, described the role of race in this incident as "covert," dealing with institutional problems in how law enforcement interacts with minority communities.

"Most people feel if this was not people of color in the area they were in, it would not happen," he said. But he acknowledged that the less-blatant nature of race in this incident changed how people are talking about it, and 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. But, she added, "I think it's an unfortunate misstep to not talk about race in this context. The Diallo case was less nuanced because it was stark. ... It's not always going to be so simple."

And any conversations about change that come in the aftermath of this shooting should include race as well, Feagin said.

"We just need a much more aggressive discussion of these stereotypes and how they can hurt people," he said. "When we don't talk about it, it happens again and again."

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Article sourced from

International Herald Tribune -02 December 2006

Race called complicated, 'cove

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International Herald Tribune -
02 December 2006