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Ten years after Amadou Diallo went down in a hail of police bullets, the most depressing thing is how often this scene has repeated itself all across the country.
It’s an odd sort of memorial we arrive at today: Looking back on a 10-year-old police execution of an unarmed black man. It feels terribly incongruent with the political high we’re now on, more like a bad memory than a resonant reminder of the challenges we face as a nation. But here we are.
It was a decade ago today, in 1999, that a purportedly elite group of New York City cops fired 41 bullets at Amadou Diallo, hitting him with 19. They had knocked on his door in search of a rape suspect; when he reached for his wallet, they assumed he was going for a gun. Nobody went to jail for the killing.
What’s perhaps most depressing about the decade since Diallo’s death is how commonplace similar reports have become—and how little these recurring atrocities have done to prompt a meaningful re-think of the way in which black neighborhoods are policed.
Oakland, for instance, marks Diallo’s macabre anniversary with Oscar Grant’s murder. Early on New Year’s Day, a gang of cops pulled Grant and a group of young black men aside in a Bay Area Rapid Transit station to investigate a fight. Cell phone videos captured the action: cops punching Grant, who was unarmed and doesn’t appear to be resisting arrest; them wrestling him to the ground, where he lay face down; and Johannes Mehserle shooting him in the back, killing the 22-year-old.
At least Mehserle has been arrested and charged with murder, though his accomplices remain on the streets. New York City marks Diallo’s murder with painful memories of the killing of Sean Bell, who yet another gang of supposedly elite cops gunned down at his bachelor party in late 2006. Last summer, they were all cleared of wrongdoing.
High-profile cop-killings like these hark back to Diallo and, in so doing, generate public demands for accountability in policing. That’s a good thing. But in their celebrity, these incidents also obscure a deeper, more troubling reality: They cannot be honestly called accidents or exceptions. Rather, they are the predictable, if extreme result of policing black neighborhoods as combat zones.
The less-publicized incidents are myriad and troubling. Take Michael Mineo. In October, according to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, a group of cops chased Mineo into a subway station, pursuing him for marijuana possession. Once they caught him, Officer Richard Kern wrestled him to the ground and sodomized him with a police baton. He’s been indicted for the attack, and two of his fellow officers have stepped forward as witnesses.
Then there’s the epidemic of stun-gun assaults now sweeping the country. As we’ve reported here on The Root, cops have killed hundreds of people with stun guns, which have become popular as supposedly non-lethal weapons. Ironically, their rapidly increasing use is in large part a response to outcry over killings like Diallo’s.
None of this gets at the root of the matter, however. It starts smaller, with the every day, routine antagonism too many cops stir up between themselves and young men in the neighborhoods they are supposed to be serving. There are the stop-and-frisks, of course: A January study found that blacks and Latinos represent 80 percent of NYPD’s stop-and-frisk targets. But there are also more subtle things, like the way in which teenage antics are treated as criminal acts when you’re black and male.
A kid like L.A. Burrell offers an example. I met the 17-year-old at a Brooklyn community center this time last year, while reporting a story on gun crime. He was one of the good kids, doing well in school and spending all his spare time volunteering and playing ball at the center. While I talked with him, hoping he’d provide a positive story from the area, he casually mentioned he had two charges on his record already.
“First time I got locked up I was 16,” he explained. I asked him what happened. He pushed his cap back from his fresh face and cocked his head as he tried to recall the details. “For fighting. Actually, I got arrested for”—he paused, till the actual charge came to him—“a riot! With four people? I don’t understand. But the charge was ‘riot.’ ”
The way L.A. tells the story, he was walking along a subway platform with friends when one guy in their group threw something at another kid passing by. It was a provocative but characteristic taunt for a group of teenage boys, and things escalated into a fistfight. Cops rounded up the whole lot of them. His second arrest came in a similar situation—one of his friends got into a beef on a subway stairwell, ending in the whole group getting busted.
In another neighborhood, it’s unlikely that teenage fistfights and shoving matches would lead to arrests, let alone to charges of “riot” and criminal records. But in L.A.’s hood, a fistfight is seen as the first step toward a gang shootout. Everybody’s a criminal in the making.
Thus, cops search housing-project stairwells with guns drawn. Thus, laws stack the deck to make prosecution easy and defense costly. Thus, small-scale crimes draw large-scale prison sentences. And, of course, every now and then a guy answering a knock at his door or leaving his bachelor party or riding public transit gets gunned down, gangland-style, by the people who are supposed to be protecting and serving him.
Ten years after Diallo, none of this has changed a whit. Until it does, law enforcement will continue to be as much a part of the problem as it is the solution in poor black neighborhoods.
Kai Wright is a regular contributor to The Root.
Comments
But in L.A.’s hood, a fistfight is seen as the first step toward a gang shootout. Everybody’s a criminal in the making. online games
But in L.A.’s hood, a fistfight is seen as the first step toward a gang shootout. Everybody’s a criminal in the making. online games
You seriously need to address the REAL issue.
Rather than focusing upon these scumbags murdering black poeple, you ought to focus upon what the cops actually are.
They are power mad, maniacical control freaks who have the attitude that they are above us human beings.
Yes, they DO profile and murder black people.
They DAILY taze, beat, kick, shoot and DELIBERATELY abuse and demean human beings OF ALL RACES/ETHNICITIES.
If you were to focus on THEM rather than limiting your articles to being about the black people they delibrately target, you would reach a much larger audience.
Do you not see that this would be a major help in getting it all publicied by exposing there bastards to a much larger portion of the population?
Every single day of the week we can see actual evidence of these terrorists prpetrating terrible crimes against humans, whether they are those who have committed a crime or the rest of us who are INNOCENT targets who experience the things they do to us FOR THEIR PLEASURE.
Let's not be bullshitted, these bastards ENJOY WHAT THEY DO TO HUMAN BEINGS.
The laws are set up and formulated to protect these murdering aminals so that they are able to KNWINGLY get away with all theie crimes against humanity.
They use their buzzwords of "cop hater" against EVERYONE who addresses their crimes.
Well, some of us are business/home owners and war veterans who are disgusted with their evilness.
Yet, WE are the ones who get labelled as such which only serves to deflect attention away from the REAL CRIMINALS-the police themselves.
Adress the entire range of their victims and, you will see that you will receive much more attention from many more poeple which is what you actually want and need.
We've seen as _few_ police atrocities against white people, e.g. S.W.A.T. teams called out for drug raids based on faulty information. They're rarer because hostile confrontations with police are rarer in those neighborhoods -- police are simply not called out as frequently to chase a suspect described as white. Maybe that's because whites don't suffer as much from racism, poverty, economic inequality, and the legacy of slavery, but that's not the cops' fault.
The atrocities you mention are horrible, but how can police _not_ treat the ghetto as a war zone when the violent death rate there is greater than among soldiers in Iraq? (And white innocent civilians in Iraq _do_ occasionally get gunned down in cases of mistaken identity.)
The solution is not to tell police to get out of the war zone mentality -- the solution is for so many black neighborhoods to cease _being_ like war zones. In the meantime, black voters must decide what kind of police presence they desire.
You can have a low-level police presence -- but unless the noncriminal residents are well-armed and determined to regulate their community themselves, the thugs will rule. Fewer fistfights will be treated as riots, but perhaps more of them will turn into gunfights.
You can have an intense police presence, but the more frequently cops are called upon to confront criminals, the more frequently they will make tragic mistakes.
You can try to reduce the rate of confrontation by legalizing drugs; but know that corporations such as Phillip Morris will then take the retail drug trade away from ghetto youth.
What is not an option is having a war zone policed by complacent, non-jumpy cops. Cops, even black cops, care too much about their own lives to offer that.
Where I live, Seattle WA, mostly it is young black males shooting at one another.
The number one cause of death for young black males is murder by other young black males.
No one seems to care. No one is writing about this. No one is agitating about this fratricide. We all just seem to accept it and I can not understand why that is.
First off the cops do get on power trips, but they're black as well as whites!! If you were a cop that was on duty and had to patrol the hood were the shit goes down wouldn't you go into stairwells gun drawn?? I mean why would you be going for your wallet if you have a team of cops pointing their guns at you?? Their seems to be something fishy about that. The cops usually check the wallet, after you have assumed whatever position they want you to do.. If I worked as a police man working the scariest place that they probably ever have been for 30k a year I would be walking around with my assualt rifle not a handgun. The places with the most crime and trouble should have the little things bring harsher punishments than in other areas!! You have to reprogram the kids in that area to not wanting to fight at all and you have to make examples out of the troublemakers that their are. When cops go into train stations and stuff they have to be on full alert too, and some cops shouldn't be cops as we see. But are you going to lay your life on the line for 30k? Me heck no! make it 80k and you will see a major increase positively in the law enforcement anywhere! The cops who stuck is baton in that boys butt needs to be left in a room with the dad of that boy and any brothers and uncles and just leave it at that!! Thats wrong and I hope he gets life for being a nasty mother who goes against anything and everything he was taught growing up!