Keystone Kops

On February 4, 1999, a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant, Amadou Diallo, stood at the door of his New York City Bronx apartment, key in hand, when four NYPD officers drove up and approached him. Dressed in plainclothes, the officers claimed to have yelled, “Police officers!” They testified Mr. Diallo resembled a rapist they were pursuing.
Mr. Diallo removed his wallet from his pocket, no doubt in an attempt to identify himself as requested. The four men drew their guns or perhaps already had their guns drawn. In any event, they fired a total of 41 shots, hitting Diallo 19 times. The City of New York ultimately paid three million dollars to Mr. Diallo’s family, an unprecedented figure since, by law, NY pays only for monetary loss.
What interests me about this case are not its sadly ordinary features, namely, that police gunned down an innocent black man, that police claimed the presence of a weapon when a weapon wasn’t present, or even that the officers walked in spite of shooting 41 bullets. What interests me are those 41 bullets, and more about that in a moment.
On the morning of his wedding, November 25, 2006, another 23-year-old black man, Sean Bell, left a bachelor party and got into the driver’s seat of his Nissan Altima. Before he and his friends could leave, at least three plainclothes NYPD officers approached the car. Again, they claim they identified themselves but witnesses and two of Mr. Bell’s friends, who were wounded in the attack, say they did not identify themselves. Justification for firing 50 bullets at the car—four hit and killed Mr. Bell while his friend, Joseph Guzman, in the front passenger seat, was hit 19 times and his other friend, Trent Benefield, in the back seat, was shot three times—centered on Bell’s driving the Altima into a police van. A judge acquitted the officers involved and the City of New York ultimately awarded three and a quarter million dollars to Sean Bell’s family, three million to Joseph Guzman, and $900,000 to Trent Benefield.
On November 19, 2011 Kenneth Chamberlain, 68, accidentally tripped his home alert button while sleeping. Mr. Chamberlain had a heart condition. White Plains, NY, police officers responded, in spite of the home alert company advising them that Mr. Chamberlain had contacted them and said he was all right. An hour later, Kenneth Chamberlain lay dead in his own home, the victim of a taser, a shotgun-launched beanbag to the chest, and finally a bullet that tore through his lungs, one of two fired. The second bullet went astray.
On November 21, 2006, Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old black woman, heard a ruckus outside her Atlanta, Georgia home, and got her gun. As three plainclothes officers smashed through her door, she fired once, hitting no one. The officers, wrongly believing they were entering a drug house, fired back—39 bullets, hitting Mrs. Johnston five or six times. Some of the shots hit three of the police officers. As she lay dying, police handcuffed the elderly woman and placed three bags of marijuana in the house. When the officers pled guilty to a number of charges and were sentenced, the judge ordered them to pay Mrs. Johnston’s estate $8,180, the cost of burying the woman.
On May 16, 2011, in the middle of the night, police gathered outside a house in a black neighborhood in Detroit. Neighbors gathered as well because a crew from the television drama, 48 Hours, was filming the scene. Although police claimed they had no idea any children were present, later evidence proved that the informant who gave them the address had told police a child lived inside. Police tossed a flash grenade through the door and one fired into the house. The grenade struck so close to where 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones slept on the sofa, it singed her blanket. More significantly, the bullet struck her in the neck and killed her instantly. Police claimed at first that they had not fired until entering the house and that the bullet discharged when the grandmother attempted to grab an officer’s gun. The film from the television crew, however, showed their story to be completely fabricated.

"They had time," [said] a Detroit police detective . . .. "You don't go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That's how it's supposed to be done." Mother Jones

Officer Joseph Weekley has been charged with involuntary manslaughter. His trial has been set for late October of this year. If he does a significant amount of time (yeah, right), we can all say "Hurrah!" That is, if we're not too busy mourning the death of a child whose only crime was sleeping on a sofa.
What do all these incidents have in common besides the obvious? Trained police officers, supposedly well-practiced in hitting a target, nevertheless fired an incredible number of bullets to hit one individual with just a few of them—or, in the case of the Aiyana Stanley-Jones, managed to hit a child in the living room squarely in the neck while standing on the porch.
The racism embedded in each of these cases—and there are thousands and thousands more, unfortunately—is undeniable. But these shootings provide more than evidence that the police are given a pass to murder African Americans. They refute the stance of the NRA and the pro-gun lobby, which claim fewer crimes would result if more Americans armed themselves.
Clearly, if a trained shooter has to fire a fusillade to have any hope of getting a bullet into a target and not into everything in the vicinity,  untrained Americans wielding their weapons—at home, in the town square, in bars and at sporting events--are a fearful thing to contemplate. It makes me tremble.