Black and Blue: New York erupts over a race-tinged killing-again - race and crime

National Review, April 19, 1999 by John O'Sullivan

Whenever a crime with racial overtones hits the newspapers, a highly predictable scenario is acted out. If the crime is, say, a mugging of a white person by a black person, the news media take immediate pains to establish that the crime had nothing to do with race. It was simply an isolated act of thuggishness. The law must take its course-but no more need be said about the matter. If, on the other hand, a black man is attacked by a white person or gang of whites, then it becomes the occasion for wider social theorizing about the persistence of racial attitudes in American society. Perhaps it was an attempted lynching; very likely, it was a hate crime; almost certainly it indicates racism in the community. And if the crime is one of police brutality against someone belonging to an ethnic minority, then it is held to demonstrate widespread ill-treatment of minorities by the police, the entrenched racism of social institutions in general, and the need for their reform along "affirmative action" lines.

If this account seems exaggerated, consider the media's treatment of two New York crimes that occurred within four months of each other in 1989: the murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a black youth, by a white member of a street gang in Bensonhurst and the rape and near-fatal beating of a white investment banker by a gang of black and Hispanic youths in Central Park. "Black Youth Is Killed in Brooklyn by Whites in Attack Called Racial," is how the New York Times headlined the Yusuf Hawkins murder. Only a few months before it had given the Central Park rape a more racially dispassionate introduction: "Youths Rape and Beat Central Park Jogger."

No one suggested that the people of Schomburg Plaza, where the jogger's attackers lived, bore any responsibility for the assault on her. Indeed, the New York Daily News solemnly warned against any such lapse into racial stereotyping: "the simple truth [is] that dreadful things are done by individual thugs to individual victims-not by or to a race." But the Hawkins murder produced exactly the opposite reflection: that it was the inevitable result of the racial hostility allegedly felt by the Italian-American inhabitants of Bensonhurst towards blacks. A Daily News editorial duly intoned: "despite the protests of some Bensonhurst residents, the attack was based on race . . . wrong to dismiss it as a bunch of neighbor rowdies going too far . . . The motivation was deeper, more insidious." Connoisseurs of double standards will especially enjoy the titles of the two News editorials. They were, respectively, "Stay Calm, New York" and "Dare To Attack Racist Violence."

This discrepancy in journalistic treatment might be understandable if most crimes in which the victims and perpetrators are of different races were committed by whites against blacks, or other minorities. But, as statistics amply demonstrate, this is not the case. In light of the sad reality, it is not racism but prudence that prompts a white person to cross the street at the approach of black youths. Merely consider the trade-off. If the white's fears are misplaced and the youths are decent, respectable persons, they will at worst suffer feelings of rejection and humiliation at being mistaken for criminals. If his fears are correct, however, then he has saved himself from something terrible. These considerations weigh very differently in the scales of justice: It is perfectly reasonable to risk hurting others' feelings in order to avoid being murdered. And when that trade-off is multiplied thousands of times, it is more than reasonable for a city police force to risk hurting the feelings of those who fit a criminal "profile" by frisking them for guns in order to save hundreds of people from being murdered.

SPLIT-SECOND DECISION

Which brings us to the case of Amadou Diallo in New York. On February 4, four New York cops searching for a serial rapist in the Bronx followed Diallo into the foyer of his tenement building and shot him 19 times, firing 41 bullets in a matter of five seconds. Diallo was unarmed, and the cops have since been charged with second-degree murder. The most common explanation, drawn from a lawyer for the four and other policemen, is that Diallo fit the profile of the rapist and the cops thought he was going for a gun. In a split-second decision, they shot him to save themselves. But since the cops have not yet given their account of the incident and there were no eye-witnesses, no one else really knows what happened.

That has not prevented New York's media mavens like the Times columnist Bob Herbert, on-the-make liberal politicians like Mark Green, failed mayors like David Dinkins, racial hucksters like "the Rev." Al Sharpton, and almost-famous people like Susan Sarandon from deciding not only that the cops are guilty of a serious crime but that such an outrage is the inevitable result of the policing tactics adopted under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In a left-wing version of debutantes being presented at court, various celebrities turn up outside City Hall to be arrested, appear briefly in court, and then head off to receive congratulations on their extremely civil disobedience over Park Avenue cocktails. Media coverage since the shooting (the New York Post excepted) has generally hewed to the line "Dare To Attack Racist Policing" rather than "Stay Calm, New York." We are continually reminded, for instance, that "four white cops" killed Diallo by newspapers that generally criticize references to the race of criminal suspects; so is journalistic etiquette thrown out the window.