On Sean Bell

I wanted to lay back for a second and just marinate on this verdict before commenting. Like a lot of black New Yorkers, my visceral reaction to these cats getting off was horror. Ask me to pick sides between the cops and a black dude they killed at his bachelor party, you can guess which way I'm going. But then I started thinking.

First, I want to put what I'm saying in context. Dig this piece from the Times today which basically concludes that black New Yorkers don't see this thing through the same lense that they saw Diallo, Louima, Dorismond etc.

In Harlem, Willie Rainey, 60, a Vietnam veteran and retired airport worker, said that he believed the detectives should have been found guilty, but that he saw the case through a prism not of race, but of police conduct. “It’s a lack of police training,” Mr. Rainey said. “It’s not about race when you have black killing black. We overplay the black card as an issue.”

And further down:

But even as some condemned the behavior of the police, other black men and women interviewed praised Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

“He’s got people who are at least willing to communicate with the black community,” said Salaam Ismail, 50, a youth coordinator, standing outside the Harlem headquarters of Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network on Friday. “The mayor has done a lot of pre-emptive strikes with that kind of stuff, meeting with community leaders.”

On Nov. 27, 2006, two days after Mr. Bell was killed, the mayor convened a private meeting of black religious leaders and elected officials at City Hall. One of those at the meeting was the city’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who a month after the shooting set up a panel to review the rules and tactics of undercover operations in response to the Bell case.

A lot of this summed up how I felt about this case. We tend to lump all instances of cops shooting innocent black folks into the same ball. But I think it's smart to unpack this stuff and examine each case and what it means.

Louima and Diallo just speak for themselves. I think what pissed so many people off about Diallo is that the guy was literally just standing there. There was no confrontation. He was just shot for being a black guy standing in a doorway. The Dorismond case was arguably worse, given Guiliani's fanning of the flames. A cop was essentially attempting to entrap Dorismond and ended up killing him. Worse still Guiliani--being the ugly fascist he is--released the dude's juvie record and claimed he "was no altar boy." In fact Dorismond literally was an altar boy and went to the same Catholic school as Guiliani.

I make no brief for the cops in the Sean Bell case here, but we have to acknowledge that, as tragic this was, as stupid and incredibly incompetent as the cops behaved, this isn't the same town, and this isn't the same sort of incident. But that doesn't mean that there is no price to be paid. I just wonder--as the judge argued--whether the court was the place to deal with that. I think these dudes should never walk the streets as police officers again--particularly the two fired the most shots at the car. I don't trust them to protect or serve my son. I think there should be a very public apology by each of them to Bell's family and specifically to his fiancee and daughter. I think the city should take care of Bell's fiancee and daughter, at the very least, until the girl completes college--paid for by the city. There was an incredible level of gross incompetence here--but I'm just not sure these dudes should have gone to jail.