Saturday, May 17, 2008
Behind the acquittal of four officers is a clear indictment of standard police procedure in Giuliani's New York.
Feb 26, 2000 | Shortly after an Albany jury acquitted four New York City police officers of all charges in the shooting death of unarmed immigrant, 22-year-old Amadou Diallo, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried, for a few minutes, to play the diplomat. He expressed "deep, heartfelt sympathy" for the Diallo family and the officers alike. "I would ask everyone in New York to reflect on the evidence and the facts," he told a City Hall press conference. "We might be able to grow by that."
But Giuliani's own personal growth soon gave way to a barely-concealed sense of vindication. While 150 miles away in Albany the Rev. Al Sharpton was imploring that "not one brick or bottle be thrown," the mayor took the occasion to lash out at "people who protest against the police, and blame them for every ill in society."
Giuliani's sense of vindication is premature. Far from a repudiation of the NYPD's critics, the the criminal acquittal of those four officers -- Kenneth Boss, Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy -- contains, paradoxically, a far more sweeping indictment.
Here is why Mayor Giuliani should take little comfort from today's verdicts. Central to the jury's decision, it appears, was the testimony of police brutality expert James Fyfe, a former New York police officer, now a professor at Temple University. I've spoken with Fyfe often over the years. He is the most precise and acerbic critic of police brutality I know. This time, Fyfe testified -- without any witness fee -- in the four officers' defense. Hours before coming down with its acquittals, the jury asked to have Fyfe's testimony read back to them.
What Fyfe testified -- simply but forcefully -- is that the officers did not have a criminal intent. Rather, he said, they followed standard police procedure when they asked Diallo to halt, and when -- thinking the wallet in his hand might be a gun -- they fired 41 times.
And standard procedure -- not premeditated brutality by rogue officers -- is the real crime in Diallo's death. Fyfe himself underscored that point the day after his testimony in the New York Times. The Diallos, he said, "were dealt a great wrong and deserve to be compensated" in a civil trial. The problem, he said, was not criminal intent but NYPD policy. Given the officers' hairtrigger training and their highpowered 16-round weapons, Diallo's death was "an accident waiting to happen."
The Diallo case is a mirror image of the last celebrated police case, the trial of four Brooklyn officers in the brutalization of Abner Louima. In Brooklyn, enraged officers systematically raped and beat Louima, a suspect in their custody, and their precinct tried to cover it up.
But in the Diallo case, there was no sadism, no rage, no coverup. Instead, there was just standard operating procedure: plainclothes officers accosting a civilian who might well have mistaken them for gangbangers, firing their guns in confusion and fear at the first mistaken hint that he might be armed, hitting Diallo 19 times.
Around the country, it is not rogue officers but standard operating procedure which has turned police brutality into the civil rights issue of the decade. In that sense, Diallo's case, not Louima's, goes to the heart of the matter.
Studies by the U.S. Justice Department and the University of North Carolina have documented that fatal police encounters are likely to begin not with major crime but with a citizen's casual defiance of an officer on a minor public-order matter. Take, for instance, a traffic stop, which led to the asphyxiation death of Johnny Gammage while in police custody in Pittsburgh in 1995, a case which brought the Justice Department into its most sweeping police-brutality investigation; or intoxication, the condition in which Archie Elliot of Prince George's County, Maryland was shot 14 times in the back the same year.
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