Though the killing was horrific enough—forty-one bullets were fired, nineteen of which hit their target—what left me truly stunned was the clinical, antiseptic policy rationale espoused by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. On the news show Nightline, the mayor, virtually ignoring Diallo’s death, glibly and confidently spouted one statistic after the next to demonstrate how the NYPD was the “most restrained and best behaved police department you could imagine.” He touted policies that had reduced crime in New York and dismissed African Americans’ concerns about racial profiling,
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