Bucky Done Gun

The trial of three New York City police officers charged with manslaughter or reckless endangerment in the 2006 shooting death of Sean Bell ended the way those trials usually do. The only time I can remember a member of the NYPD incurring criminal penalties for his use of force on an African-American male was when Officer Justin Volpe was sentenced to 30 years for sodomizing Abner Louima with a broken toilet plunger in a bathroom of the 70th Precinct. (Another cop was found guilty of lying about the assault.)That trial's outcome probably owed something to the fact that the victim was still alive and had had his injuries certified by doctors. And while you can claim to have shot an unarmed man by accident, or without knowing that he was in fact unarmed, the same cannot be said of someone you've raped in a well-lit men's room, especially if at the time of said rape he was handcuffed.

That impunity isn't limited to NYPD, or to attacks on black men. Police officers rarely face criminal charges when they kill white men, either, as they do in more than half of all police shootings. Some of that impunity has to do with the credit that our society extends to police officers, the trust it places in their judgment as to when to use lethal force-- and against whom-- and in their veracity in accounting for the use of that force. Some of it has to do with our collective understanding that we need the police to protect us-- though given what happened to Sean Bell or Abner Louima or Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times while reaching for his wallet, maybe that "us" should be qualified. The police protect most of us. They perform a job that lies beyond most of our competence or courage. And knowing that we need them-- need them to use violence against people who might otherwise use violence against us-- we give them the benefit of the doubt. (Even though an NYPD study shows that in the overwhelming majority of cases in which officers fire at suspects, no one is firing back.) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/nyregion/08nypd.html?hp

What complicates the Bell case is that two of the cops involved were themselves African-American. They didn't shoot Bell--even 50 times -- because they were racists. They may have shot him because they were inept, or poorly trained, or because they and their white colleague had had two drinks apiece, or because the strip club where they were holding their stakeout was reputed to be a meeting point for drug and gun dealers. They may have shot him because they were afraid. A crucial piece of defense testimony was that one of Bell's companions was heard to say that he was going to get a gun, and the fact is that there is a subculture within the African-American community that treats guns as a fashion accessory, like oversized jeans and overpriced sneakers, and their display and occasional use as components of bella figura. This is true even among good kids. If you are a cop who knows how popular gangsta attitudes and gangsta style are among many young African-American men, you might be forgiven for jumping to conclusions when you hear one such man talking, maybe jokingly, maybe not, about getting a gun. Someone who dresses and talks like a gangsta might also act like one.

For an analogy, we might look back to the old West where, judging by movies and TV, everybody wore a gun or two and any real man knew how to use one. There were fewer lawmen in those days, but I imagine that there were plenty of instances in which they shot men who, like Amadou Diallo a 110 years later, were reaching for their wallets. But those cases probably never went to trial, a lawman's word having even higher value back then than it does today. When I read about the morons agitating for the universal right to carry concealed weapons, like the ones who invited an Internet gun dealer to speak at Virginia Tech on the first anniversary of its massacre, I wonder if any of them have considered the likelihood that if their proposal ever gets off the ground and Americans are allowed to carry concealed weapons in churches, schools, and shopping malls, how many will end up being killed by police, killed perhaps while reaching for their wallets. A consolation-- maybe a dubious one-- will be that more of those victims will be white.

All its nuances aside, the verdict of the Bell trial demonstrates that African Americans still make up a class of designated sufferers-- people whose misfortune, whether in the form of poverty, crime, joblessness, derelict housing, broken schools, or brutal mistreatment by the representatives of the law is taken for granted. Of course, the killing of Sean Bell wasn't entirely taken for granted. A headline in the New York Daily News quotes his fiancee: "They Killed Sean All Over Again." But the headline of the Post was all about the defendants. It read, "In the Clear"-- the print equivalent of a sigh of relief. As far as the Post was concerned, the only victims in the Bell case were the officers who had shot him. Part of the hell of designated sufferers is that they are rarely recognized as victims.

Three Years Late and $29 Billion Short

During a ceremonial appearance in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward today, presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain issued a sharp critique of the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. He characterized it as "terrible and disgraceful" and vowed that if such a catastrophe had happened on his watch, he would have landed his plane at "the nearest Air Force base and come over personally." He did not say if he would have piloted the plane himself and whether he would have brought along an inflatable life raft or a mop and a bucket.

In May 2006 McCain was one of 21 senators to vote against a bill authorizing $29 billion for post-Katrina recovery. He claimed that it contained unnecessary spending provisions. That aside, the senator was indulging in the sort of belated indignation that has been a part of the political language ever since a legislator from a southern state was heard to say something uncomplimentary about slavery, probably around 25 years ago. In the periodic table of America's historical wrongs, slavery has a longer half-life than, say, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Only 46 years passed between President Roosevelt's signing of Executive Order 9066 and President Reagan's signing of a Congressional apology for same.

Indignation for past wrongs is painless, especially if it is unaccompanied by contrition. Indignation is never having to say you're sorry. The mistake was somebody else's. Someone else gazed idly out the airplane window at the drowning city. You, of course, would have gone there in person.