Boy, Mos Def is going to have a heyday with this one.
As 23-year-old Sean Bell was buried on Saturday in Queens, N.Y., another African-American family mourned the loss of a son, father and what was a soon-to-be husband gunned down by the New York Police Department in the most completely absurd amount of bullets - 50 - on Nov. 25.
Def, who produced and sang the chorus on the hip-hop song "A Tree Never Grown," a song that challenges the NYPD's 41 shots that sent African immigrant Amadou Diallo to his grave in 1999, hasn't come out with anything - yet.
But he will. And it will be vociferous, much like Brooklyn rapper Papoose's song "50 Shots." And what will undoubtedly happen after more African-Americans across the country stand up for Bell and his family, as the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson already have, to challenge the NYPD's trigger-happy antics?
Acquittals.
Five of them to be exact. A thank-you gift for each officer involved, one of which unloaded two clips on the car and has worked for 12 years with the department.
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Oh, and did I mention Bell was to be married the same day 50 bullets whizzed through his car windows, killing him and injuring the two friends he was with? Because he was, and to his high school girlfriend.
The Diallo shooting saw all four of the cops involved acquitted. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, used the Diallo incident as an example of how much we process in the blink of an eye - sometimes wrongly, oh so wrongly. Those officers, all of whom were white, saw a black man reaching for what they thought was a gun and let the
bullets fly. Too bad for them that gun turned out to be his wallet.
On Nov. 25, five NYPD undercover detectives, who were white, Hispanic and African-American, thought they were doing the right thing when they made the split-second decision to pull their triggers. Thought they heard one of the three say he was going to get a gun after leaving a strip club for Bell's bachelor party. Thought the three were going to go back into the club to cause problems with the people they had been feuding with inside. Thought they were fleeing when they tried to drive away and hit a plainclothes officer who never identified himself and had a gun at his side. Thought, that when the car hit an unmarked police vehicle, they were de-escalating a potentially dangerous situation the best way they knew how: 9 mm pistols doing the talking for them. Too bad for them no gun was found in the car nor on any of the three inside it.
What seems to be the underlying theme in both shootings, along with the case of 13-year-old African-American Nicholas Heyward Jr., who was shot and killed in Brooklyn in 1994 because he was playing with a toy gun, is panic.
Cops panic. They have guns. Triggers are depressed. Lives are ended.
While Bell's family won't ever get to see him smile again, five cops will walk away from a courtroom with acquittals sometime next year - if they're even indicted. But here's to hoping that the next time cops come across African-Americans, or anyone for that matter, they think might be dangerous, they do exactly that: think.
Because, in the words of J-Live on "A Tree Never Grown," it's obvious right now that their "tips ain't the only things that's hollow."
Riley Bauling
Editor in chief
