Mayor Calls 50 Shots by the Police ‘Unacceptable’
By DIANE CARDWELL and SEWELL CHAN
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg convened an extraordinary meeting of black religious leaders and elected officials at City Hall yesterday to calm frayed tempers over the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in Queens, calling the circumstances “inexplicable” and “unacceptable.”
“It sounds to me like excessive force was used,” the mayor said of the conduct of the officers, who fired 50 shots outside a Queens nightclub early Saturday, killing Sean Bell, 23, hours before he was to be wed, and injuring two others. “I can tell you that it is to me unacceptable or inexplicable how you can have 50-odd shots fired.”
Mr. Bloomberg made the remarks after meeting with some of the city’s most influential black politicians and community leaders, including Representative Charles B. Rangel, the Rev. Al Sharpton and dozens of others.
The mayor’s decision to meet with Mr. Sharpton and other black leaders was a stark turnabout from the approach of Mr. Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who did not reach out to black leaders in the immediate aftermath of the fatal 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant who died in a hail of 41 police bullets.
Mayor Bloomberg’s blunt assessment of events still under investigation was striking, although he took pains to point out that the facts were not all in, saying several times that he did not yet know what happened in the shooting, but that he expected that a grand jury would be impaneled by the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown.
In a move that suggests the officers feel their actions were justified, the lawyer representing the men said he had contacted Mr. Brown’s office and offered to have the officers speak to prosecutors and appear before a grand jury voluntarily without immunity. The police have not released the officers’ names, saying they are trying to protect them from retaliation or harassment.
Philip E. Karasyk, who is a lawyer for the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said, “We feel confident that once all of the facts and circumstances of this tragic incident are known, then our detectives will be exonerated.”
“This was a tragedy, but not a crime,” he said.
Mr. Brown said in a statement that he intended to convene a grand jury to hear evidence in the case. While Mr. Karasyk has represented the four men who are detectives in the preliminary stages of the investigation, three of the four will get new lawyers, possibly as soon as tomorrow, because each must have his own and it remains unclear whether they will pursue the same strategy. The fifth man, an officer, has different representation.
Participants at the private meeting at City Hall, which included Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and several high-ranking Bloomberg aides, described the discussions as frequently heated, with the mayor sitting next to leaders whom he counts as supporters. Those more critical of the administration’s response to the shooting, including Mr. Sharpton and City Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn, sat on the opposite side of the table.
Mr. Bloomberg’s approach of reaching out to community leaders has drawn praise, and he plans to go to southeast Queens today to meet with community leaders there. But his efforts have left some unconvinced that the underlying conflicts between the police and predominantly black communities are being addressed.
“We prefer talking than not talking, but the object is not a conversation, the object is fairness and justice,” Mr. Sharpton said as he left City Hall. “Because we’re not just interested in being treated politely, we’re interested in being treated fairly and rightly. And that will happen when police are held as accountable as anyone else.”
Mr. Bloomberg pledged to do just that, saying that the city would review its policies and training procedures to ensure fair treatment, but he added that he did not believe that the shooting was racially motivated. Of the officers who fired on Mr. Bell’s car, two are black, one is black and Hispanic, and two are white.
“I do not at this point believe that there was anything racially motivated here, but we’ll wait and see whatever the facts are,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “A lot of people feel that this on top of other incidents that have happened in the past is a pattern that is unacceptable. I find that pattern unacceptable as well,” Mr. Bloomberg continued, adding that he saw the shooting as an isolated case.
“There is no evidence that they were doing anything wrong,” he said of the men who were shot, referring to the moments leading up to the confrontation with the police.
Some policies appear to have been violated in the shooting, which occurred when, according to the police, undercover officers fired 50 bullets at Mr. Bell’s car after he drove into one of the officers and an unmarked police van.
Officers are trained to shoot no more than three bullets before pausing to reassess the situation, Mr. Kelly said in his most detailed assessment of the shooting yet. Department policy also largely prohibits officers from firing at vehicles, even when they are being used as weapons.
Although several of the leaders at City Hall expressed confidence in the mayor and the police commissioner, the emotional meeting, which began with outbursts of anger and ended calmly, laid bare some of the rifts among New York’s black leaders themselves. Some expressed support for the mayor’s handling of the case or refrained from criticizing him. Many, however, expressed concerns that the administration was failing to deal with what they described as continuing tensions between black residents and police officers even when the officers are not white.
“There were some heated exchanges,” said the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, an influential Pentecostal minister in Brooklyn. “We all agree that there is a pattern of police abuse of power, and this abuse of power ranges from police killing to police brutal behavior to disrespect. We reiterated that over and over again.”
Mr. Daughtry warned the mayor not to confuse patience with complacency. “There is a temperature in our communities that is rising, and the tension is intensifying,” he said. “While we don’t want to try to ignite anything, we’d be blind to overlook what’s happening and not to sound the alarm.”
But other leaders played down the anger in the room, saying that some participants seemed determined to bring up past history or to pursue agendas with little bearing on this specific case.
“There’s always anger after incidents like this and there’s always a lot of people that bring up other incidents,” said City Councilman Leroy G. Comrie Jr. of Queens. “People confuse history, and specific people are concerned about their individual actions.” He added: “You have different people that don’t know each other, there’s always room dynamics, you know, because people come in with different agendas or some people are off topic altogether.”
The shooting happened as the police were undercover in the club, Club Kalua, to investigate reports of prostitution and drug dealing. There was a dispute outside between two groups of men, and one group of three or four left. One undercover officer followed them, believing they might have been going to get a gun before returning to the club. In the officers’ version of events, the undercover officer confronted the men in Mr. Bell’s silver Nissan Altima, and they tried to run him over, prompting the fusillade from him and his backups.
Some of the leaders expressed dismay over Mr. Kelly’s revelation that one of the undercover officers had had two beers in the course of the operation inside the nightclub, but was not given a breath analyzer test. Mr. Kelly said that undercover officers are allowed the two drinks and are not normally tested for intoxication. He said they were deemed fit for duty by their superior.
While the office of Mr. Brown, the Queens district attorney, will oversee the criminal inquiry, the tactics employed by the detectives and their supervisor during the events leading up to the shooting and the shooting itself will also be reviewed by the Police Department. Several people who have been briefed on the detectives’ version of events raised questions about their tactics.
For instance, they said that one undercover officer who had been inside the club without his weapon retrieved it from a police vehicle and then engaged the men in the Altima, even though that task should have been left to the backup team. Mr. Kelly said that sequence of events was unusual.
Saying there was a “grave crisis” of confidence in his southeast Queens community, Bishop Lester Williams, who was to have performed Mr. Bell’s wedding, said there had been no improvement in police-community relations since the height of tensions under Mayor Giuliani.
“It’s Little Iraq, I’m sorry, especially toward the blacks in the community,” he said before attending the meeting. “We don’t feel protected.”
But others said that Mr. Bloomberg had made some progress simply by setting a new tone. “Just the simple fact of meeting, or discussion, or expressing concern and outrage on the part of this administration, was different,” said Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., the city’s top black elected official.
Shortly after 5 p.m., many of the same black leaders who had attended the meeting with Mr. Bloomberg went to a briefing at the Queens County Courthouse with Mr. Brown.
Mr. Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre, 22, the mother of their two daughters, arrived with her father and Mr. Bell’s mother, Valerie, and uncle.
Nearly two hours later, Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Bell’s family left, pushing past reporters without saying anything. Several other civic leaders said the meeting had been emotionally difficult, with Ms. Paultre and Ms. Bell bursting into tears. The civic leaders declined to discuss the meeting’s specifics, but said they were satisfied with what they had heard.
While officials met and discussed the case, Mr. Bell’s father, William, 53, stood by his house on a quiet, suburban street near Cambria Heights and said that they were all missing the point.
“It’s more about politics than human life,” he said. Mr. Bloomberg has spoken with Sean Bell’s fiancée and said he plans to visit the family soon, but William Bell said none of the officials had reached out to him.
“At least they could say ‘I’m sorry,’ ” he said. “Say ‘I’m sorry, I’m going to find out what’s going on.’ ”
“He’s gone,” he said of his son. Then, patting over his chest, he added, “Not here in my heart he’s not gone, but he’s gone.”
Daryl Khan, Michelle O’Donnell and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
― nu_onimo (nu_onimo), Tuesday, 28 November 2006 16:10 (seventeen years ago) link