Sitting Ducks

When I heard, shortly after Thanksgiving 2006, about the shooting of Sean Bell by five New York City police officers, that he was killed with four bullets from a torrent of 50 shots, my thoughts were not only of him. They were also of Amadou Diallo.
Diallo was killed in February 1999 when 19 of 41 shots from four New York City police officers pierced his body, mere feet from the safety of his front door, after one of the officer identified his wallet – reached for to provide identification – as a gun.
These men, now dead, had some interesting things in common. Both were 23, both were headed home after participating in legal early-morning activities, both were unarmed, both were shot at by multiple officers at the same time and those responsible for both their deaths were found not guilty and set free. Oh and both were Black.
But why in 2010, you ask, am I talking about this old news?

This week federal prosecutors announced they would not charge the officers involved in the Sean Bell shooting with civil rights violations and closed the case, ending any chance of a successful criminal prosecution against those officers. When announcing the decision, prosecutors indicated, according to a report from Huffington Post, there wasn't enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers acted willfully – meaning, they couldn't prove Bell was shot because he was Black.
Another thing Bell and Diallo have in common.
I wonder how you can, as a single officer shooting at Sean Bell and crew did, fire 31 shots – emptying the loaded chamber and a 15-bullet magazine, reloading, and then emptying a second 15-bullet magazine – without willfulness? How can you do that and not know, sometime before you run out of projectiles, who you are shooting? One shot, even four shots, perhaps not willful. But 31? Fifty?
And if it wasn't willful, perhaps in New York there are more insidious police problems like poor marksmanship and an over-enthusiasm for random, excessive gun play. If they weren't shooting a Black man for being Black, then both these instances feel like spontaneous, coordinated bursting into a surreal re-enactment of the shootout at the O.K. Corral, not unlike the transition in a musical.
The danger of this scenario – a group of cops shoot and kill an unarmed Black man and walk away unpunished – is that each time it goes down like this, it gets easier to do again. It seems to make Black men sitting ducks. If you can't make a case against officers firing in excess of 40 bullets into an unarmed man that isn't even a suspect, it must be open season. Otherwise the sheer idiocy of it all should bring about some sort of punishment.
If it's this easy for the police to pump 40-50 bullets into a Black person on the street, what would keep renegade officers from using just one or two whenever they feel like it? Is this what it felt like in the early 1920s or '30s, knowing your son or father, simply because he was Black, might not make it home alive because he could be snatched off the road and lynched? Have we come full circle, except now the people we fear are the police? And how else should we see it when there seems to be no justice, even in the face of such clear excess?
To all the law abiding, quality police officers, who often at great person risk do their jobs with integrity daily, I apologize that you are getting viewed through this lens. But the community shouldn't move on from this, as suggested by James Culleton, an attorney for one of the officers in the Bell case. Justice was not done and the people, Black men especially, are not safe. We should not rest until we can, at least, believe we are.

Complete your 2010 Census form when it come to your home in March. Be counted to increase funding for needed community initiatives. 


A luta continua ...

Talibah Chikwendu is the executive editor for the AFRO-American Newspapers and a former columnist for the newspaper.