Kyle K. Murphy, a former lieutenant in the New York Police Department, and currently a graduate student in journalism at Columbia, wrote an editorial in the Sunday NY Times exonerating the police who killed Sean Bell on the grounds that the police were afraid. Was their fear justified? Does fear excuse murder?
Mr. Murphy writes:
I trained more than 1,000 supervisors, using seminars and role-playing exercises in various subjects including deadly physical force. Trust me: training can instill good habits and safe tactics, but you can’t control the level of fear, or the individual choice that a person makes about when to pull that trigger. In that position, an officer has seconds to make a life-altering decision: Is my life in imminent danger?
Mr. Murphy's basic claim is the police shouldn't have been prosecuted because they were afraid. Mr. Murphy seems to think that as long as a police officer is afraid, he or she can shoot anyone they want. I wonder how Mr. Murphy would feel about that if his wife was shot in the head because she reached to get her pocketbook during a routine traffic stop.
Mr Murphy then goes on to write:
No one can fairly say that the detectives outside the Kalua [the night club where the killing occurred] were not in a dangerous situation.
Actually, we can. Although Mr. Bell was clearly trying to get away from the officers, Mr. Bell never posed a serious threat to any of them. The same can be said of the Amadou Diallo killing in 1999. Mr. Diallo was never a threat to the officers and their lives were never in any danger. In the killing of Sean Bell, Mr. Murphy tells us, the officers violated department guidelines which "prohibit using deadly force against someone in a vehicle unless he is threatening an officer’s life by means other than the vehicle, such as firing a gun at the same time." And yet Mr. Murphy seems to think that fear alone is sufficient justification for firing 50 bullets into Mr. Bell's car.
There are other questions, much more important, that Mr. Murphy has chosen to ignore. Is fear alone sufficient justification to allow the police to kill? Must that fear be justified by the circumstances? Do the police have a higher responsibility to protect the public since we trust them with deadly weapons?
What were the exact circumstances surrounding the killing? Mr. Bell and his friends had committed no crime but one of the officers thought they overheard a conversation in which someone in the Bell party spoke about going to get a gun. The plain clothes officers confronted Mr. Bell after he started his car and Mr. Bell attempted to flee the scene. It wasn't clear if Mr. Bell knew that the plain clothes officers were police officers. It is clear that some of the officers had been drinking in the bar although their blood alcohol levels were never taken. It was at this point that the officers started firing into the car.
Was the officers' fear justified? There is nothing in the description of the incident that makes it sound like the officers were ever in danger. Even if Mr. Bell did have a gun, the officers were on a dark street surrounded by cars that they could have used as cover if the situation got to that point. Think of it in these terms, if you or I had been at the scene instead of the police, do you think emptying your licensed gun into Mr. Bell's car would have been excused on the grounds that you were afraid of Mr. Bell? And what exactly were the police afraid of? Could it be that they profiled four young black men as criminals? Ask yourself this question, if there had been four 16 year old white girls in the car, do you think that the police would have fired 50 bullets?
Mr. Murphy's article does not give any reasonable justification for the murder of Sean Bell. If officers are afraid of black men then they do not belong on the force. If they kill because of unjustified fear, then they are guilty of at least manslaughter. Until the police are held to a reasonable standard of behavior, these types of killings will continue.
Mr. Murphy closes with these words:
In his closing arguments last week, the prosecutor, Charles Testagrossa, said, "We ask the police to risk their lives to protect ours." I agree. But they shouldn’t have to gamble with them.
And no one is asking them to gamble with their lives. But in this case they didn't gamble with their lives, they gambled with the lives of four young black men, and Sean Bell lost.