I found this article a little disturbing.

The large majority of victims and perpetrators have been black. Not a single one of those black-on-black killings has prompted protest or demonstrations from the city’s black advocates.

(As for caring about slain police officers, forget about it. Sixteen cops—including several black policemen—have been killed since 1999, not one of whom elicited a public demonstration of condolence from the race hustlers.)

If demonstrators gathered outside the jail cell of every rapist and teen stick-up thug, cameras in tow, to shame them for their attacks on law-abiding minority residents, they could deglamorize the gangsta life.


Those minority victims who survived will have to rely on the police and the courts, not the race “advocates,” for vindication.

Inner city, or "black on black", crime is more complex and will not be solved by having advocates simply stand outside the jails and protest.

The writer is implying that blacks/minorities and/or poor people normally sympathize with hard core criminals, just out of their unfounded hatred for the police, which is not the case. The writer also seems to assume cops are always completely innocent and doing their jobs.

But because cops are humans and therefore fallible, it is impossible to prevent every wrongful shooting—without emasculating the police entirely.

That is somewhat true; obviously to err is human and police officers are often put in extremely dangerous situations where they need to make quick decisions that are matters of life and death. But we can't assume that police officers would never abuse their power.

What do they think would have happened without this self-righteous piece of boilerplate? That the “investigating authorities” would have conducted a biased, half-hearted investigation?

Maybe. It's hard to prove whether or not they're guilty in a situation like this, but being that they are cops and claimed to be in dangerous situation, it wouldn't be so hard to give them a slap on the wrist and a warning to be more careful next time if it weren't for the public outrage that followed.

The stigma against helping the police—referred to derogatorily as “snitching”— is pervasive. “If you’re a snitch, people want to kill you,” a teen robber in a Brooklyn crime rehabilitation program that I observed this spring explained.

Instead, their opportunistic cop-bashing only increases the hatred of the police and the stigma against cooperating with them. As a result, more lives will be taken by cop-eluding barbarians.

Having civilians and police officers work better with one another is a two way street. The stigma didn't come from nowhere. While you could argue that stories like this only hyperventilate the negative attitudes people, mainly minorities and the poor, have towards cops, it wouldn't stand on its own mainly because the stories stir people for two reasons.

Whether race is an issue or not, cops have more power than the average individual and some are prone to abuse it. People, especially ones who are often targeted by cops, will relate stories like this one to their personal experiences which are often negative.

I am a white female with a babyface. I don't exactly fit the desription of the type of person officers are known to bother the most. But even I am extremely reluctant to ever call the cops for anything, and it's not because I have never met any who seemed nice and filled with integrity, but the negative experiences I have had overshadow the positive ones by far. And I think this is the case for most people who stigmatize cops. It may not be fair but it's the way it is.

A lot of the negativity also comes from the fact, that often times the police are looking for ways to fill their quotas, and will look to fill them with small crimes, which occur more frequently, causing people to see them as trying to just catch them on anything than can, rather than solving serious crimes like murder.

Most of the time, when cops are trying to get people to "snitch", it's not for something like murder or rape, more likely it's for selling or buying drugs, and they're probably trying to get you to give info on a person close to you--in other words, the norm is not getting people to snitch on a murder they saw in the street.

Because of their power, they should be held to higher standards because the system is going to be naturally biased towards them in a case like this.

It would also help to see justice in a case like this, regardless of whether they are proven guilty or not, because that could also help alleviate the worries of some who fear cops. If a case like this isn't seen as given serious consideration, it would only seem to prove the stereotypes.

The author's comparison to the cops and normal criminal doesn't hold much weight for that reason. These cases do happen less often, but they are the ones who are supposed to be protecting justice and need to be held to a higher standard.

Even black officers are part of the hated white establishment. “Black cops, I disrespect them. They sucking the white man,” asserted another juvenile delinquent in the Crown Heights rehab program

People keep saying how it could not have been a racial issue since the cop who shot the first bullet was also black, but that in itself doesn't necessarily disqualify the race charge because black cops may feel more inclined to target blacks for two reasons:

1) It wouldn't seem racist in itself since they are the same race.

2) Given the "other" attitude many people have towards cops, a cop who joined the force may be likely to see other minorities in an even worse way because they look down on them and may even partially blame them for promoting such stereotypes againt black people-stereotypes they may feel they're fighting off. Contrary to popular thought, people often are harder on people more like them.

I think it's more about the system's institutionalized racism that this indivudal case.

Also, whether or not race was an issue (I'm not saying it definitely was) or even if they truly believed they had a gun in the car, doesn't 50 bullets seem a little excessive??

Whether or not it was racially motivated, it was still police brutality, and the spintastic article you linked only reinforces that conclusion.

First, let's look at MacDonald's analysis of what actually happened:

A group of undercover officers working in a gun- and drug-plagued strip joint in Queens had good reason to believe that a party leaving the club was armed and about to shoot an adversary. When one of the undercovers identified himself as an officer, the car holding the party twice tried to run him down.

The question of whether or not the officers identified themselves before opening fire is still an open one. If they didn't (and there are eyewitness accounts saying they didn't, contrasting the police accounts that they did), then why would the victims, at a location described as "gun- and drug-plagued," assume anything other than the non-uniformed men in unmarked cars with guns drawn are criminals? If I'm in a crime-ridden area, and I see guys with guns coming towards me, without any police identification, I'm going to assume they're NOT police. I think that's both a reasonable and prudent assumption.

Now, I can understand why the author of "Are Cops Racist?: How the War Against the Police Undermines Black America" and "Diallo Truth, Diallo Falsehood" might reflexively side with the NYPD's version of events, but nobody, MacDonald included, has argued that the officers were following proper procedure. They undeniably weren't. No NYPD officer may fire at a moving vehicle, period. And the reasons why not are cleary evident--not only can suspects claim to have not heard the police identify themselves, but bullets have a disturbing tendency to not hit their intended targets when those targets are in motion (case in point, the officers that killed Bell and wounded his friends also hit nearby homes and nearly hit two Port Authority policemen and another unarmed civilian at a nearby train station).

While MacDonald thinks that there was confirmation of a fourth suspect fleeing the scene, law enforcement sources talking to the NY Daily News have also said that police actions following the shooting do not indicate they were searching for anyone else, which one would expect them to do if they thought a potentially armed suspect was nearby. This seems to indicate yet again that MacDonald is engaging in some serious selection bias when it comes to deciding which accounts to believe--it think she'd argue that Fred Hampton was going for a gun, too!

Whether or not the shooting was "racially motivated," it was certainly an instance of police brutality. I think it's safe to say that anytime a group of officers kills an unarmed man and wounds two others as a result of violating police procedure, it counts as police brutality.

So, was Bell shot because he was black? Probably not. Were the police who shot him violating procedures and behaving inappropriately? Hell yes.

MacDonald is pushing the same agenda she's pushed for years, and as a result she shows a clear and undeniable bias in favor of the shooting officers' version of events (which, as I noted above, still indicate a major violation of NYPD procedure). We don't have a "fuller picture," we have one version of events presented as Gospel by an author with a clear bias (I think this article, given MacDonald's past writings, could probably likewise be better typed as 'right-wing spin' than a a 'fuller picture').

This is not an issue of Civil Rights, but one of Human Rights The world is watching to see if the Big Apple is really rotten at the core. Will the life of one unarmed Black Man count for something? We will see as his body is weighed in the balances of justice.

Sean Bell Shooting
Link