Word: diallo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...frame game some Illinois authorities have allegedly been playing hits the headlines at a time of heightened national concern over aggressive law-enforcement practices. In New York City, authorities have been on the defensive since last month, when a West African street peddler named Amadou Diallo was killed by police. He died in a barrage of 41 bullets as he entered his Bronx apartment building. The police say the officers fired on Diallo because they thought he was reaching for a gun. He was unarmed...
...Diallo killing has prompted a wave of protests and civil disobedience. More than 140 demonstrators, including Congressman Charles Rangel, former Mayor David Dinkins and N.A.A.C.P. president Kweisi Mfume, have been arrested in front of New York's police headquarters in the past two weeks. The protests are designed to pressure the police department--and especially Mayor Rudolph Giuliani--into addressing racism and brutality in the ranks. And New York City public advocate Mark Green last week called on Police Commissioner Howard Safir to resign, saying Safir has failed to deal adequately with the allegations against his department...
...officers who shot Diallo were members of the elite street-crimes unit, a plainclothes force charged with getting guns off the street. The unit makes up 1% of the police department but seizes 40% of guns recovered in New York. Critics say the unit, whose unofficial motto is "We own the night," cuts legal corners and is too quick to resort to force. "You have to have a new paradigm of policing," says Ron Daniels, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "This gung-ho, military-type, fraternity-style policing has got to change...
Last Friday, Safir appointed a black officer to the No. 2 position in the street-crimes unit. (Black leaders dismiss the move as window dressing.) Both Safir and Giuliani have emphatically denied that the police are guilty of misconduct or racial bias. The Diallo controversy, Giuliani says, has been stirred up by political activists and the scandal-hungry press. In fact, he points out, fatal shootings by police are at their lowest level in 13 years. The police department is controversial, its supporters say, because it has been doing its job vigorously. And they note that it has been phenomenally...
...suffer from it are not even aware of their affliction. It makes it more difficult for people of all races to build on past victories in the struggle for equality because we have to keep fighting the same debilitating battles over and over. Every time an outrage like the Diallo shooting occurs, many whites treat it like a tragic exception in an otherwise fair and just system, rather than as a symptom of chronic racial injustice. Raise a fuss about continuing racism and you're accused of exaggerating or imagining things...