Killer cops go free
By Norm Dixon
On February 25, residents of New York City's African-American, Latino and immigrant neighbourhoods were stunned to hear that a jury had acquitted the four police officers who shot Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo to death.
Just before 1am on February 4, 1999, Diallo — who made a scant living selling videos from a street stall 12-hours each day, six or seven days a week — returned to his home in the Bronx. After saying hello to his house-mates, he went outside to stand in the building's doorway — perhaps to think about home. No one will ever know. Diallo's two-year sojourn in New York in search of the "American dream" was about to end.
At that moment, a car reversed to a halt in front of Diallo and four burley white men in street clothes, brandishing semi-automatic pistols, jumped out and ran towards him. The men were yelling (Diallo understood English with difficulty) and pointing their guns at him.
Diallo attempted to escape back into the building but the door had closed. As Diallo was turning to face the men, with his wallet in his hand, the men opened fire. In the ensuing 41-shot fusillade, Diallo was hit by 19 bullets, striking his heart, aorta, spine, lungs, liver and spleen.
The killers were members of the New York Police Department's notorious "elite" 350-strong plain-clothes Street Crime Unit (SCU), an overwhelmingly white battalion of undercover cops whose task is to implement New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's policy of "zero tolerance" policing. Diallo was a victim of that policy.
Zero tolerance concentrates on petty "crimes" with the claim that this will reduce serious crime. A fundamental component of the crackdown is the random "stop and frisk". African-Americans and racial minorities bear the brunt because of the NYPD's and city government's racist assumption that such people are more likely to be crooks. This is known as "racial profiling".
According to SCU records, as of early 1999, 45,000 people had been stopped and searched. The unit admitted that this represented just 20% of actual searches. NY state attorney general Eliot Spitzer has reported that 62.7% of all people stopped by the unit were black.
NYPD commissioner Howard Safir all but confirmed that the NYPD engages in racial profiling when he justified the concentration on blacks with the statement: "The unfortunate truth is that communities of colour are disproportionately victimised by violent street crime".
Not surprisingly, New York's African-American and immigrant minorities see the SCU as an occupying army of latter-day racist "night-riders" (as the Ku Klux Klan was known). The SCU motto is "We own the night"!
As the trial of the cops on charges of second degree murder unfolded, it became clear that Diallo stood as much chance of receiving justice as he did of surviving the hail of bullets.
The cops' lawyers successfully moved for the venue of the trial to be moved from the Bronx to the predominately white city of Albany, where residents were unlikely to have experienced zero tolerance policing. The defence unsuccessfully tried to have three black women removed from the 12-person jury.
The defence case rested on convincing the jury that by his actions, Diallo had caused his own death. The cops testified that Diallo fitted the general description (he was black) of a serial rapist active in the area 12 months earlier, was behaving "suspiciously" by "peering" out of the doorway and "slinking" about. Diallo failed to obey commands to stop when the cops leapt out of their unmarked car, and instead "darted" inside, then "assumed combat position" as he removed "a black object" from his pocket.
Defence lawyer John Patten, in his closing argument, stated that although it was just a wallet, when Diallo pulled it out, "that was it. You can't expect [the cops] to stand there and get blasted away."
The prosecution suggested that a more plausible explanation was that a terrified man was trying to hand his wallet over to what he thought was a gang of robbers with guns.
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Teresi made acquittal almost certain when he issued the instruction to the jury from the bench: "A person who acts in self-defence is not guilty of a crime". On several occasions, Teresi told jurors that if they accepted that the police officers "reasonably believed" Diallo was armed and dangerous, they must acquit.
Teresi further bolstered the defence position when he said that a police officer should not be considered the aggressor in a situation where the officer gives chase or pulls a gun.
The jury disregarded evidence that showed that the cops had no legal grounds to suspect Diallo of a crime, that they did not identify themselves as police or warn Diallo before opening fire, and that firing continued after Diallo had fallen to the ground.
At the conclusion of the trial Teresi visited the defence lawyers at their hotel to thank them for their cooperation.