Murphy's Law of Law Enforcement

Guns Magazine, July, 2000 by Massad Ayoob

When five cars skid into a pile-up on black ice and one driver dies, it's an accident, not murder. The Diallo shooting was an accident based on an unlikely chain of events fuelled by reasonable but mistaken perceptions, not by malicious intent, which is the key ingredient of the crime of murder.

There are some 8 million people in New York City, almost 40,000 cops, and there are as many as 6 million interactions between cops and citizens per year. With that many runs through the mixer, anything that can go wrong, probably at some time will.

The jury saw that. The law provided for it. The jury said afterward that the law was clear. They were right.

We all pity Diallo and his family. We all need to know that when confronted by cops whose minds we cant read, we shouldn't make sudden movements, attempt to flee or disobey commands. In this instance, the tragedy may have been caused by the officers' equipment more than any other factor. If the cops had been issued good ammo, like the 124 gr. P Gold Dot hollowpoint, which NYPD has now, Diallo might have gone down more quickly in a wounded-but-survivable condition.

There will be a lawsuit. I predict the city will settle out of court. Such vote-hungry politicians as Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and Bill Bradley have already as much as said they want federal charges brought against the involved officers. Two of them are in a position to try to make it happen. Whether it does will be a measure of the integrity of the federal prosecutors.

Many critics said the prosecutors dropped the ball. I disagree. You must first have the ball in order to drop it. District attorneys know the law, and in this case they had to know they had no grounds to bring the charges they did. There was no dropping of balls because, in this case, they had none.