Diallo is a martyr, but the cops aren't murderers

Racism didn't kill the African immigrant, but his death has forced the police and the community to reckon better with one another.

By Stanley Crouch

Mar 1, 2000 | Last year, approximately 680 people were murdered in New York, while the New York Police Department sent 11 to oblivion. One of them, tragically and unfortunately, was Amadou Diallo. Diallo died in a hard rain of 41 bullets fired by four police officers while the NYPD was still suffering the shock and disdain provoked by Officer Justin Volpe's sodomizing Abner Louima with a wooden stick in a Brooklyn precinct house.

In the wake of the Louima case, Mayor Rudy Giuliani appointed a task force to develop recommendations for improving police-community relations. I was on that task force, which visited precinct houses, talked with cops and spoke with community people. We made recommendations, many of which were put into practice. Then, after the Diallo case, New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir created a board of visitors to the Police Academy to make recommendations that might improve the training and better the quality of the police work. I was appointed to that study group as well.

The result is that I have observed aspiring cops in classrooms, on the shooting range and in role-playing encounters with people inside homes, businesses and on the streets; and I have spoken with veterans and supervisors. Every cop I spoke to about the Diallo case thought the four guys who shot him had essentially screwed up. They unanimously said that it was what is called "a bad shooting," driven by surprise and panic, of the sort that attends work in areas where there are many illegal automatic weapons, on the same streets where cops have died in action.

At the very least I expected a guilty verdict on the charge of reckless endangerment. But no matter how much howling and whining there might be, no matter all of the sanctimonious denouncements, I do not see police officers as bigoted white demons who arrive in so-called minority communities thinking that they are the anointed zoo keepers who must sometimes subdue the animals, and sometimes use deadly force against them. I also have no doubt whatsoever that there are cops who have those attitudes, but attitudes and actions are two very different things.

Those attitudes, when they are bad, create occupational hazards within law enforcement because brutal and dirty cops turn communities against the police. This means that an officer in mortal danger might lose his or her life because hostile community members may refuse to call 911, say "Officer in trouble" and make clear where the rough stuff is going on.

But the average cop already knows how that works, and those in charge try to combat bad attitudes among cynical cops, day by day. How the cynicism and brutality come about in certain cops is as understandable as it is deplorable. All too often, police officers meet people at their very worst -- in family squabbles, under the influence, in the middle of melees. They come to know people when shocking things have been discovered about them, such as the fact that they have been brutalized or their children or their wives; or are guilty of sexually molesting the young; or have murdered their spouses or their parents; or function in worlds of vice so lowdown and dirty that the air around them seems darkened by spiritual coal dust.

In fact, one black cop said to me a few years back that if he weren't black himself, he might be tempted to become a racist, given the terrible things that he witnessed on his job. One of the reasons that didn't happen was that he knew dozens upon dozens of Negroes who were not like those who made life in high crime areas so abominable.

At the NYPD Police Academy, in the wake of the Louima and Diallo cases, there has been new emphasis on giving cops more information about the lives of those they will encounter in blue-collar communities inhabited by blacks and Latinos, so that those who dont know those communities intimately can come to understand them. In one class, for instance, a black female cop asked her students how they would handle a situation in which a woman, outraged that her child was being arrested, stepped into the middle of things. Now one thing you have to understand, she said to them: I'm big, I'm black, I'm a female and I might be very loud. But loud doesn't always mean threatening, she explained.

In another class a black instructor brought a stone-cold street hustler to explain certain things to the recruits. (It turned out that his stone-cold hustler was actually a cop himself.) They role-played "stop and frisk" situations, and got to see how effective verbal judo could be, rather than force.

Next Page: What if Diallo was killed by drug dealers? Would anyone care?

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