When their unmarked Ford Taurus arrived in the Bronx’s Soundview section just before midnight on February 4th, the four undercover police officers were in pursuit of a serial rapist. One local resident had told them of a suspicious-looking figure, whom they found fidgeting and pacing in front of the doorway of 1157 Wheeler Avenue. Rather than passively surveiling the figure from their car, the officers decided to confront him directly; after all, had he been their suspect, they couldn’t afford to let him escape.

Officers Sean Carroll and Edward McMellon approached the figure, the latter with his unholstered 9mm semiautomatic pressed against his right thigh. Both officers had their badges on display. When the officers identified themselves and ordered the figure to freeze, he quickly turned away and stepped toward the doorway of the apartment building. Ordered to “come out and keep your hands where we can see them,” the man turned slightly to his left, reached into a pocket with his right hand, and began to withdraw a black object.

“Gun!” yelled Officer Carroll. “He’s got a gun!” Officer McMellon, who was closest to the figure, drew his gun and fired three quick shots at the figure, retreating as he did so. As he withdrew, the officer’s footing failed, and he fell backward with his arms overhead — looking to his fellow officers as if he had just been shot, at point-blank range.

There was a brief, stunned pause, followed by a sudden adrenaline spike. Officer Carroll began firing into the vestibule. Officers Kenneth Boss and Richard Murphy, who had been observing from their car, heard the shots and saw officer McMellon fall; thinking that a raging gunfight was underway, they took up defensive positions behind the car and unloaded on the figure, who was by now crouching in the doorway. Officer McMellon, suffering from a cracked tailbone as a result of his fall, dragged himself away while firing at his perceived attacker.

The lead-storm was brief, but lethal: 41 shots were snapped off in a period of no more than eight seconds. Nineteen of them perforated the slender body of Amadou Diallo, pinning him against the wall without knocking him down. At least one round had pierced the 22-year-old’s aorta — mortally wounding him. While one officer summoned an ambulance, Officers Carroll and Boss went to retrieve the gun, only to discover, to their horror, that there was no gun — only a black wallet and a pocket pager. Carroll desperately administered CPR in a futile attempt to save Diallo’s life.

For these four officers from New York City’s elite Street Crimes Unit (SCU), “The terrible truth had kicked in,” observed a New York Post account of the incident. “They had made an irreversible, tragic, but honest mistake.” Officer McMellon, who had regained his feet, threw his hat to the ground and kicked it in frustration. As Officer Carroll made a frantic but futile attempt to save Diallo’s life, he wept openly; Officer Murphy did as well. Officer Boss, in a state of shock, climbed into the back seat of an arriving police car and stared vacantly into the middle distance.

Diallo, a street vendor from Guinea, was a victim of a tragic combination of circumstances, beginning with the fact that he fit the description of the rapist-murderer being pursued that terrible night. Diallo reportedly lied to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, describing himself as a refugee from political persecution; this may have explained his instinctive refusal to cooperate with self-identified police. Then again, Diallo’s lack of fluency in English may have prevented him from adequately understanding the officers’ commands. Nevertheless, Diallo was an unarmed, innocent man the night he was shot to death by the SCU officers — a black immigrant killed by white police officers.

Within hours of the shooting, the anti-police movement’s race-baiting auxiliary was fully deployed. “Reverend” Al Sharpton, the pompadoured peddler of street rage, organized demonstrations in front of One Police Plaza at which radicals who obstructed the entrance could undergo a painless arrest. More than 800 people — including (in the words of the Associated Press) “politicians, Jewish leaders, groups of seniors and youths and notables like National Association for the Advancement of Colored People President Kweisi Mfume” — were eventually arrested for disorderly conduct. Celebrity arrestees included former New York Mayor David Dinkins (on whose watch violent crime proliferated and police morale plummeted), Democratic Congressman (and friend of Fidel Castro) Charles Rangel, and actress Susan Sarandon.

When Diallo’s mother and father, Kadiatou and Saikou Diallo, were brought to New York to collect the body of their son, Sharpton intercepted them and appointed himself to serve as “family adviser.” The role of “adviser” is a familiar one to Sharpton. His most notorious work in this capacity came as an “adviser” to Tawana Brawley, the black woman who claimed to have been kidnaped, assaulted, and raped by six white law enforcement officers in 1987.

Brawley’s story was a penetrable hoax, and a grand jury dismissed the case in 1988. Last July, Sharpton, along with co-advisers Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, were found guilty by a Dutchess County, New York jury of defaming former Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones, who was the central figure in Brawley’s fraudulent accusations. Despite the fact that Sharpton’s attorney Michael Hardy, in a tearful plea to the jury, insisted that compelling Sharpton to make restitution to Pagones “would be to make the ultimate determination and ultimate statement that black people in America have no rights,” the racially mixed jury ordered Sharpton to pay $65,000 in damages to the victim of his racially motivated smears.

To this day, Brawley — who has changed her name to Maryam Muhammad and become a follower of Louis Farrakhan — insists, the evidence notwithstanding, that she was assaulted and raped by white racist cops. For those who subscribe to Sharpton’s perspective, the dismissal of Brawley’s suit merely illustrates the tenacity of the white racist conspiracy. Reverend Jesse Peterson, founder and director of Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND), which opposes the racist agenda of establishment-ordained black “leaders” such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan, pointed out to THE NEW AMERICAN that “too many people in the black community fall victim to the big lies of our so-called leaders. When someone like Sharpton alleges that the ‘white racist police’ are raping and killing black people, it doesn’t have to be true to be believed; it just has to be said.”

Whenever the friction between law enforcement and the criminal element produces a spark of racial conflict, Sharpton and his minions can be counted on to nurture that spark into a bonfire. By late February, Sharpton — whose “advisory team” had expanded to include such dubious notables as Johnnie Cochran, who pioneered race-based jury nullification in the O.J. Simpson trial; leftist attorney Barry Scheck, a former protégé of the late Communist legal agitator William Kunstler; and Benjamin F. Muhammad, eastern regional director for Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam — had networked with hardcore radical groups throughout New York and the U.S. to make the Diallo tragedy the latest leftist cause célèbre.

Jesse Jackson, who visited New York to address the protesters, declared that the anti-police demonstrations had “mobilized this city in a most healthy way” and predicted that “Reverend Sharpton, the ministers, the rabbis, and others are going to escalate their protests … until the madness ends.” One example of that “escalation” occurred when protesters led by Sharpton marched on the homes of the four SCU officers carrying a casket — a piece of political street theater clearly intended to foment violence, which fortunately did not materialize.

More than 2,000 people gathered at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York for a February 12th memorial service on behalf of Diallo. “Yes, [the shooting] was racial in one sense,” former Mayor Dinkins told the crowd. “When was the last time you heard of an unarmed white man being shot down like this?” Mrs. Diallo, who was understandably distraught over the death of her son, told mourners that “his blood shall be a sacrifice for all of us.... Because of him we shall fight together to save all of our children.”

In this fashion, the Sharpton-led anti-police campaign was supposedly consecrated by Diallo’s blood. Sharpton accompanied the Diallos to Guinea, and then brought them back to the U.S. to serve as human props in his ongoing anti-police campaign. Diallo’s father was at Sharpton’s side at an April 3rd “Emergency March Against Police Brutality” in Washington, DC, during which Sharpton announced that he and the Diallos would embark on a nationwide tour to highlight the supposed epidemic of police abuse.

As Sharpton and his fellow agitators provide pressure “from below” directed against local police, the federal government is offering complementary pressure “from above.” Bill Clinton used his March 13th radio address to announce several new initiatives intended to expand and consolidate federal government control over local law enforcement bodies across the country.

First, declared Mr. Clinton, the Justice Department would broaden its efforts to provide “police integrity and ethics training” to local police — a dubious proposition at best, given the manifest unsuitability of any part of Mr. Clinton’s incurably corrupt Administration to tutor anybody about integrity and ethics. Mr. Clinton also insisted that since “police departments ought to reflect the diversity of the communities they serve,” the Administration would seek additional federal funding “for minority recruiting.”

He also called for the passage of his “21st Century Policing Initiative,” which would place another 50,000 federally funded police on America’s streets. Mr. Clinton also announced that the Administration’s year 2000 budget “includes new funding to enforce our civil rights laws so that a few bad police officers do not undermine the progress, and the support, that hundreds of thousands of police officers have worked so hard to earn.”

Mr. Clinton noted that he had instructed Attorney General Janet Reno “to convene a series of meetings with law enforcement and community leaders.” After holding the first of those meetings Ms. Reno declared, “We’ve got to make clear that excessive force, not justified by the law or the circumstances, and abuse of authority will not be tolerated,” conveniently forgetting her own actions in ordering the disastrous military raid against the Branch Davidian congregation in April 1993. Leaving aside the fact that neither an impeached, sociopathic President nor his most tenacious accomplice in obstructionism is qualified to scrutinize the conduct of local police, the Administration’s efforts to expand federal control over state and local law enforcement bodies provide an ominous counterpoint to the street-level campaign by the radical left.

“Al Sharpton and his allies are trying to discredit the police, and they’re threatening to ignite a race war in New York and other major cities in pursuit of that goal,” Reverend Jesse Peterson explained to THE NEW AMERICAN. “The Nation of Islam, the ACLU, the Communist Party and its front groups, radical groups who support convicted cop-murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal — the whole far-left network is organized with the objective of destroying the police. People in the black and Hispanic communities are barraged with rhetoric from these Communist and radical groups calling the police a ‘racist army of occupation,’ and too many people fall for this line. What they need to understand is that the police are there to protect them from lawless thugs who would threaten their lives and property — and that many of those same thugs are the people who are trying to mobilize people against the police.”

“Federal control over local police is dangerous as well,” Reverend Peterson continued. “Every dictatorship in history has had a centrally controlled, nationalized police force. There are bad police, and honest police who make mistakes — sometimes even tragic mistakes, like the Diallo shooting. But people have to understand that the way to improve the performance of their local police is to make them locally accountable, rather than by destroying the police outright — like the Communists seek to do — or by handing them over to the control of bureaucrats and social engineers in Washington, DC.”

Once police power is centralized, it is essentially placed beyond accountability — which means that abuse of power is more likely to occur than when that power is diffused among state and local law enforcement bodies and made accountable to the citizens whose lives and property the police are required to protect.

The shooting of Amadou Diallo was a terrible mistake, and the officers who shot him will have to confront the consequences of their error. However, Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson has acted on the assumption that criminal intent, rather than inexperience (each of the four officers had only a few months of experience with the SCU) or mistaken judgment, produced the shooting. Johnson has charged the officers with two counts of second degree murder — the first alleging that the police acted with criminal intent to kill, the second alleging that their actions displayed “depraved indifference to human life.” Both counts carry prison terms of 15 years to life. A third count, first-degree reckless endangerment, could result in a prison term of up to seven years.

“It’s ludicrous to charge these cops with second degree murder,” protested Bo Dietl, the renowned former New York police officer who was one of the first to volunteer for the Citywide Anti-Crime Squad (the progenitor of the SCU) in 1971. Dietl, whose investigation and security firm, Bo Dietl and Associates, has inquired into the Diallo incident on behalf of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, told THE NEW AMERICAN that “the DA wants people to think that these cops got into their car that night and said to each other, ‘Hey, let’s go kill some black people.’ That’s not only untrue, but it’s utterly irresponsible for [D.A. Robert Johnson] to suggest this. Those officers were in that neighborhood, a largely black neighborhood, to protect its residents from a violent criminal, not to gun down innocent people.”

In early April, police arrested a suspect who later confessed to being the notorious “Bronx Rapist.” Isaac Jones, a janitor who lived within one mile of Amadou Diallo’s Soundview apartment, was formally charged with committing four rapes and is suspected of raping 51 women. In addition to being a near-neighbor to Diallo, the suspected serial rapist and burglar bears a marked resemblance to the unfortunate victim of mistaken identity — a fact that pared down the already razor-thin margin of error and led to tragedy on the night of February 4th. All of this underscores Dietl’s contention that the SCU officers were seeking to protect, rather than terrorize, the residents of Soundview.

During his 14-year career as a street crime cop and police detective, Dietl made over 1,400 felony arrests. He served as a street decoy, allowing himself to be threatened and sometimes assaulted by violent criminals in order to draw them away from law-abiding citizens and take them off the street. Despite the fact that he experienced scores of physical confrontations with violent suspects, including more than a dozen life-threatening standoffs with armed criminals, Dietl never fired his gun at a suspect. With the benefit of his experience, Dietl understands how terrible mistakes like the Diallo tragedy can occur.

“When I was on street crime duty, my partner and I went after two men who raped and tortured a nun at an East Harlem convent back in 1981,” Dietl recalled to THE NEW AMERICAN. “I’ve got a pretty good idea of what went through the minds of those officers [from the Diallo shooting]. They were after a rapist and they thought they had found a pretty good suspect. Had a white guy who fit the description acted in the same way that Diallo did — ignoring police commands, trying to get away, and then reaching suddenly for something in his pocket — the same thing probably would have happened to him. It’s a terrible thing regardless of who the victim was, but the point I’m making is that it wouldn’t matter one bit whether the victim was black or white.”

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir, seeking to placate police critics, have announced that the SCU will no longer be a plainclothes undercover unit, and will expand its roster to include more black personnel. These “reforms” meet with mixed reviews from Dietl. “If there are good, motivated volunteers for street crime duty who are black, they should be brought on board,” Dietl opines. “The unit is supposed to blend into the community, so more black street crime officers would be a good idea. But putting the unit in uniforms defeats the whole purpose. It’s supposed to be a plainclothes unit that can fight crime at the community level and get drugs and illegal guns off the street.”

Another reason why the cops involved in the Diallo shooting resorted so readily to gunfire is the memory of Kevin Gillespie, a 33-year-old SCU cop who was murdered on the streets of the Bronx in March 1996. Three parolees who belonged to a violent Bronx gang called the Park Avenue Boys had car-jacked a BMW at gunpoint. Gillespie and his partner gave pursuit, eventually sandwiching the hijacked vehicle between their unmarked car and that of another SCU team that arrived as backup. The suspects disembarked and began firing at the cops. One of them, Angel Diaz, fired a shot that caught officer Gillespie just above his bullet-resistant vest, mortally wounding him. Diaz, who also caught a round, was eventually caught. Gillespie died alone, in the street.

Officer Owen Steele was on patrol the night Gillespie was murdered, and he told the CBS news program 60 Minutes that he was haunted by the fact that the young officer died out on the street alone. “When you’re a cop and do this job the way the guys at street crime and undercover do it, [you may] get shot and killed in the line of duty, and [then] lay there and … look up at the sky for your last few moments of life,” Steele pointed out. “I mean, he didn’t have anybody, and that bothers me because God knows we’d all want to be there, we’d all want to hold his hand because he deserved it — because he would have held our hand. He went alone, and that bothers me.”

Ten thousand police officers attended Officer Gillespie’s funeral; afterwards, the young father of two sons, a Marine veteran of the Gulf War, was given a proper hero’s burial in a military cemetery on Long Island. But the police had to endure a gratuitous indignity when Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson announced that he would refuse to seek the death penalty for accused cop-killer Angel Diaz, a thrice-convicted felon who had been paroled despite a lengthy and lurid record of violent crime. “When you seek the death penalty, you’re not really getting what you think you’re getting,” pontificated Johnson on 60 Minutes. “You’re taking risks with the case, perhaps with an innocent defendant. You’re spending the state’s money. You’re using the court’s time.... [A]ll you’re getting is a response to a gut reaction. I have an obligation to weigh all of that and make sure that if I ever, ever sought the death penalty, all of that was overcome.”

New York Governor George Pataki eventually removed Johnson from the case, and Diaz cheated the executioner by hanging himself in his cell. Johnson, who displayed such fastidious concern for the rights of a plausibly accused cop-killer, is the same prosecutor who seeks to convict the SCU cops of second degree murder in the Diallo case — based on nothing more than a “gut reaction” to a complex and tragic incident. Johnson is apparently willing to run extraordinary risks with the Diallo case.

Proving that the cops acted out of a criminal intent to murder Diallo, Dietl told THE NEW AMERICAN, “will be just this side of impossible. They were there on a case, and they were following leads. The theory that they were prowling for black people to kill just won’t cut it.”

Demonstrating “depraved indifference to human life” will be similarly difficult, according to New York attorney Bob Unger. “It may even be difficult to make a case under negligence laws, since in emergency situations like those confronted by police on the streets, a different standard of rational conduct applies,” Unger pointed out to THE NEW AMERICAN. “This shooting is a horrible thing, and there’s got to be some accountability here, but there’s no criminal intent at work here. Charging them with ‘murder two’ is sheer lunacy.”

Johnson’s “lunacy” may be a prelude to major urban violence. “The phrase ‘Rodney King riots’ has popped up a lot around here recently,” Dietl told THE NEW AMERICAN. “I’m not sure how these officers are going to get a fair trial when a lot of people think they have to be found guilty of murder so that ‘Justice for Amadou’ will be done.” If a judge or jury balks at handing down a guilty verdict on a second degree murder charge, Dietl concluded, “we may have a really hot summer here in the City.”

The grief of Amadou Diallo’s parents and friends is real, as Terry Gillespie can testify. Terry is Officer Kevin Gillespie’s mother, and she understands how a mother feels when her son is killed. In her case, she lost a son when he was murdered by a violent felon who should not have been released from prison to prey on the law-abiding.

She can also understand why the SCU officers made the tragically mistaken decision to fire their weapons. Police routinely have to make split-second decisions. For street crime officers trying to enforce the law amid heavily armed street criminals, those decisions often must take no more than a shaved fraction of a split second — and sometimes they are wrong. “Kevin had a choice, just as these other officers did,” Mrs. Gillespie told THE NEW AMERICAN. “He chose not to fire instantly, and he’s dead now.”

Referring to Amadou Diallo’s grieving mother, Terry Gillespie declared, “It’s horrible what she’s had to go through. I will never forget, no matter how hard I try, what it was like to make the trip from our house to see Kevin’s body, knowing that he was dead and that I couldn’t do anything to change it. I just had to travel from Long Island to the Bronx, but that was the longest trip of my life. But this poor woman had to travel all the way from Africa, spending hours and hours on that plane thinking of her son and knowing what she would see when she got here. It’s too awful to contemplate, and my heart goes out to her.”

For Al Sharpton and his comrades, however, Mrs. Gillespie has nothing but frigid contempt. “These people are shamelessly exploiting the pain of a grief-stricken mother and using it to advance their racist agenda,” she asserted to THE NEW AMERICAN. “Sharpton is shameless and completely without decency. He doesn’t care about her grief, beyond what he can do to use it. He’s not interested in peace or justice. He and his blind followers are motivated by hate. They want to ruin the lives of four young men who have served this community and risked their lives. They want to destroy the police, who are there to protect their rights as well as those of the rest of us.”

Mrs. Gillespie remembers that her son Kevin “loved being a policeman. One of his fellow officers once described him as ‘in-your-face-happy’ to serve the community as a street crime officer. I got to know his unit very well; it was like one big family.” During one visit to SCU headquarters, Mrs. Gillespie was recruited “to cook for the guys at the base, and they were really grateful to have some home cooking after spending so much time on the streets. My meals were a big hit.”

“Everybody needs to understand that although these men sometimes make mistakes, they’re decent and courageous individuals who are willing to endure risks to defend us from criminals,” Mrs. Gillespie said. “They do dangerous work that must be done, and when there are problems and mistakes, they should be dealt with responsibly. But even when terrible mistakes are made, these men who are on the streets to protect us deserve our support and our gratitude.” 

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