Amadou Diallo or Trayvon Martin?

[Historian]

Since I have no plans to hijack my own thread, I’ll take this up here.

Which verdict was the more puzzling/unfair, the Amadou Diallo case or the Trayvon Martin case? And by the way, nothing long term (in terms of reforms, etc.) came out of the Diallo case, and nothing is likely to come from Martin’s case after the 15 minutes (figuratively speaking, of course) of protests are over.

CBS 2 via Associated Press

Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant with no criminal record, was 22 years old when he was killed on Feb. 5, 1999, by four New York City police officers.

The officers — Kenneth Boss, Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy — acknowledged firing 41 shots that night, but said they thought that Mr. Diallo was carrying a gun. Mr. Diallo, who came to America more than two years before from Guinea and worked as a street peddler in Manhattan, was hit by 19 bullets while standing in the doorway of his Bronx apartment building.

The case set off massive protests across the city, and became a flashpoint for heightened frictions between minority leaders and the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

All four officers, who were in plainclothes, said they approached Mr. Diallo because they thought he fit the description of a man wanted in a rape case. They contended that when he pulled out his wallet to show identification they mistook it for a gun.

The officers faced prosecution on second-degree murder and other charges but were acquitted by a jury in Albany, where the trial had been moved because of concerns over pretrial publicity.

[Historian]

Recalling the Details (Diallo)

Officers in Bronx Fire 41 Shots, And an Unarmed Man Is Killed
By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: February 5, 1999

An unarmed West African immigrant with no criminal record was killed early yesterday by four New York City police officers who fired 41 shots at him in the doorway of his Bronx apartment building, the police said.

It was unclear yesterday why the police officers had opened fire on the man at 12:44 A.M. in the vestibule of his building at 1157 Wheeler Avenue in the Soundview section. The man, Amadou Diallo, 22, who came to America more than two years ago from Guinea and worked as a street peddler in Manhattan, died at the scene, the police said.

The Bronx District Attorney's office is investigating the shooting, whose details were still murky last night because there were apparently no civilian witnesses and none of the police officers involved had given statements to investigators. But Inspector Michael Collins, a police spokesman, said that investigators who went to the scene of the shooting did not find a weapon on or near Mr. Diallo.

Relatives and neighbors described Mr. Diallo as a shy, hard-working man with a ready smile, a devout Muslim who did not smoke or drink.

''I am very angry,'' said his uncle, Mamadou Diallo. ''He was a skinny guy. Why would the police shoot somebody of that nature 30 or 40 times? We see the police and we give them all the respect we have.''

A friend, Demba Sanyang, 39, said: ''We have a very undemocratic society back home, and then we come here. We don't expect to be killed by law enforcement officers.''

The four officers involved in the shooting were assigned to the aggressive Street Crimes Unit, which focuses largely on taking illegal guns off the street. All four officers, who were in plainclothes, used their 9-millimeter semiautomatic service pistols, which hold 16 bullets and can discharge all of them in seconds.

Two of the officers, Sean Carroll, 35, and Edward McMellon, 26, emptied their weapons, firing 16 shots each, the police said. Officer Kenneth Boss, 27, fired his gun five times and Officer Richard Murphy, 26, fired four times.

All four have been put on administrative leave, which is standard practice after a police shooting.

Three of the officers -- Officers Carroll, McMellon and Boss -- have been involved in shootings before, which is unusual in a department where more than 90 percent of all officers never fire their weapons in the line of duty. In those previous incidents, Officers Carroll and McMellon were found to have acted properly, the police said; the case of Officer Boss -- he shot and killed a man said to be armed with a shotgun on Oct. 31, 1997, in Brooklyn -- is still being reviewed by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office.

Police rules on when officers can fire their guns are explicit: deadly force can be used only when officers fear for their lives or the lives of others. But once they decide to shoot, officers are trained to fire until they ''stop'' the target from causing harm. They are told not to fire warning shots, and to aim for the center of the body, not arms or legs.

Police officials said it was unclear whether the circumstances of the confrontation between Mr. Diallo and the officers justified such a shooting. What the police say is known is that the four officers were patrolling Mr. Diallo's neighborhood yesterday morning in an unmarked car in the hope that they would make arrests and in the process turn up information about a serial rapist in the area.

At a quarter to one, the officers encountered Mr. Diallo. All four got out of the car and approached him as he stood in the vestibule of his building, the police said.

A police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that a neighbor reported after the shooting that he had noticed a man, who the police believe was Mr. Diallo, loitering in the vestibule. The man described him as ''acting suspicious,'' said the official, who did not elaborate.

The officers did not communicate over their radios before they approached Mr. Diallo, the police said, so investigators said they did not know what prompted their initial interest in him.

Nor is it known why the officers began firing. A second police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, ''We don't know what happened, because we haven't spoken to them, but it looks like one guy may have panicked and the rest followed suit.''

After the shooting the officers called in on their radios, the police said, and neighbors telephoned 911. Soon other officers arrived on the scene, followed by detectives and the ranking officers who are required to respond to all police shootings.

An investigation began, and no weapon was found on Mr. Diallo, Inspector Collins said.

A pager and a wallet were found lying next to the body, a police official said, adding that it was unclear whether the officers could have mistaken the pager for a weapon.

Mr. Diallo had lived in New York for two and a half years. A member of the Fulani ethnic group, he came from a village called Lelouma and followed relatives who had moved here. He worked as a street peddler, selling socks, gloves and videos on 14th Street in Manhattan. He sent much of the money he earned to his parents back home, friends said.

Source: The New York Times
(http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/05/ny...is-killed.html )

[Lazie]

I remember this case. When those 4 killers walked free I was shocked. Another case is the Sean Bell case. I think these 2 cases were more shocking than the Martin case.

[Bricktop]

Cmon son...that is a no brainer...

[Hortical]

Song for Amadou Diallo

Damian Marley & Ziggy Marley & Buju Banton & Bunny Wailer & Morgan Heritage & Yami Bolo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCbDq4ia2Q8

[Historian]

A Question

Damian Marley & Ziggy Marley & Buju Banton & Bunny Wailer & Morgan Heritage & Yami Bolo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCbDq4ia2Q8

Hortical, I heard this recording on one occasion, I think, but I had no idea this was recorded for Amadou Diallo. Or is it that you are today dedicating this song to his memory?

This is a sincere question, because I know nothing about this recording.

[Historian]

Expand a Bit

Cmon son...that is a no brainer...

Brickie, I guess that, like you said, it’s a “no brainer,” but it would nonetheless be nice if you expanded a bit.

And by the way, I was born in the 1960s, so I suspect I’m a bit too old for the “son” label (lol). (Just teasing you, boss.)

[Muadib]

Little different.. Police on Civilian violence is treated differently from Civilian on Civilian..

Police are given waaay more latitude and sympathy when they are on duty..

I would not use the Diallo Case as a comparison...

[Historian]

I See....

Little different.. Police on Civilian violence is treated differently from Civilian on Civilian..

Police are given waaay more latitude and sympathy when they are on duty..

I would not use the Diallo Case as a comparison...

So, there should be some latitude, notwithstanding the fact that 41 shots were fired that night, with 19 entering the body of a young man whose only crime was reaching into his pocket for his wallet? Four policeman firing 19 bullets into the body of a young man who they suspected of being a rapist? What the hell is wrong with firing a bullet or two into his arm? Am I missing something important here?

Muadib, you usually make a great deal of sense, in my opinion, as far as your views on sexual orientation (I fully support freedom of choice in private sexual matters) and on Jamaica’s politics are concerned, but in this thread I must say that you are off. Way off, boss!

[Hortical]

Historian, this is an old song from 1999 and as you realize now, it never got any promotion or airplay. It was provided by Ziggy's label to the media community at that time, and yes recorded for Diallo.

[Hortical]

We all the agree the cops got away with murder. There was a study where people were asked to make fast decisions whether racial bias triggers the decision to shoot a suspect.

University of Chicago Magazine
Social psychologist Joshua Correll uses a video game to test whether racial bias triggers the decision to shoot a suspect.

In Correll's video game, images of suspects--both armed and unarmed, black and white—flash onto a monitor. Within a split-second, subjects must decide whether to shoot.




On the day U.S. attorneys decided not to file federal charges against four New York City police officers for killing Amadou Diallo—a West African immigrant whom the officers fired upon 41 times before discovering that the object he’d been reaching for was not a gun after all—social psychologist Joshua Correll was in Denver watching the news with his father. It was January 31, 2001. Eleven months earlier, jurors had acquitted the officers of second-degree murder in a New York State criminal trial, and this latest announcement sparked fresh protests from those who saw Diallo’s death as evidence of police brutality and racial profiling.



Correll, set to begin PhD studies that fall at the University of Colorado, found himself wondering about “all the trouble that had come from trying to interpret what happened on that night in 1999.” Would different circumstances—race, in particular—have yielded a different outcome? “What if the officers had approached a white guy and he had run into the vestibule of his apartment building and reached for a wallet?” as Diallo did, Correll asks. “What would have happened—in that neighborhood in the Bronx in the wee hours of the night?” The fact is, he says, “we don’t know.”


Nevertheless, he has tried since then to wend his way toward an answer. In four years of doctoral work and two years of Chicago research as an assistant professor of psychology, Correll has examined how racial bias plays into an officer’s decision to shoot a suspect. Using images of white and black men, each gripping a cell phone, a wallet, or a handgun, Correll and his Colorado colleagues devised a video-game experiment that requires split-second judgments. One after another, images flash onto a monitor and participants must assess whether the man in each picture is carrying a gun. Within 850 milliseconds (or fewer, depending on “how much we want to push people,” Correll says), they must press one key to shoot or another to leave the figure unharmed. The “targets,” as Correll calls them, stand in different poses—kneeling, striding, arms crossed, hands near their pockets—and they’re placed before mostly urban backgrounds: a public fountain, an apartment-building courtyard, a construction site, a leafy park, a parking lot.



In experiment after experiment—Correll has tested undergraduates, DMV customers, mall food-court patrons, and police officers—people’s mistakes, although rare, follow a pattern: they shoot more unarmed blacks than unarmed whites, and they fail to shoot more whites than blacks who turn out to be holding weapons.


Recounting the results of four separate studies in a 2002 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article, Correll and fellow researchers wrote, “In the case of African American targets, participants simply set a lower threshold for the decision to shoot.” That trend held true even when the participants themselves were African American.
The trend is less likely a function of active prejudice than of ambient social stereotypes, Correll says. These cultural biases “come not from what you personally believe or want to believe, but from long-standing associations drilled into our heads every time we go to the movies or pick up a newspaper or hear a joke.” In surveying the participants, he has found keen awareness of stereotypes more reliable than racial prejudice at predicting performance. “So those who report that in America black people are more often seen as violent—not those who actually consider black people to be more violent—are the ones most likely to show bias.”


A study in the June 2006 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology offers proof of how deeply lodged those stereotypes are. In that test, Correll hooked electrodes to participants’ scalps to monitor the electrical activity of neurons firing as the video game played out. “Surprise, surprise,” he says, “the P200s”—a neuronal voltage jump associated with threat responses—“tended to be bigger for black faces than for white faces.” Especially strong P200s translated to more pronounced bias in the video game. “This fluctuation is happening just 200 milliseconds after the stimulus appears on the screen,” Correll says. “We’re talking very, very quick—preconscious. This is your first gut response.”
Correll’s latest experiments involve urban police officers. Overall, they’ve proved quicker and more accurate than ordinary citizens. “They make very few mistakes,” Correll says, “which is reassuring.” But they aren’t free of bias. For a study published in June’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Correll recruited Denver police officers, Denver residents, and cops from 14 states to play the video game. On one key measure—the correlation between race and reaction time—officers showed the same susceptibility to stereotypes as civilians. “When they see a target that contradicts the stereotype,” a black person without a gun or an armed white person, “they hesitate,” he says. “They wait a couple of extra milliseconds, but they don’t make the wrong decision.”
Two other studies in the same JPSP article offer evidence that bias can be trained out of people. When participants—whether police, civilians, or students—played the game four times over successive days, “they got better.” Yet reaction-time bias persisted. “What changes is the number of mistakes.” Identifying a tiny object like a gun against a complex and changing background requires control and discipline, Correll says, especially when the image doesn’t conform to ingrained expectations. Police training teaches control and discipline, making officers’ mistakes rarer. But reducing errors is “as good as it gets,” he says, “unless we can change all the cultural stereotypes in the country.”
Plenty of research lies ahead, Correll says. He plans to investigate a finding from his experiments involving police: that race-influenced delay proved more pronounced in big-city officers than their small-city counterparts. He’d like to conduct more tests measuring neuronal fluctuations, and Correll is also beginning to use images of Hispanic and Asian men to examine how subjects from different regions react to those ethnicities. With every test, he says, he’s closing in on what makes police pull the trigger. “It’s still a very messy question.”

[Muadib]

I stated a fact... Police are given way more latitude.. I did not say I agreed with it..

My point is you cannot use Police vs Civilian incidents as a barometer of what will happen regarding prosecution of a civilian vs civilian case and and what will happen if there is a not guilty verdict..

A rule of thumb.. if I appear to be way off in matter it is probably a misread on your part..

[Mosiah]

Hehe

I have been misreading all your labourite rants for all these years! Now it all makes sense!

[Hortical]

What the hell is wrong with firing a bullet or two into his arm?

Cops are trained to shoot center mass. Asking a cop to shoot someone in the arm & leg, well that's from the movies.

[Muadib]

yuh seeit !