Bloomberg's Swift Response To The 50 Shots

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is once again proving that he can handle a crisis. This afternoon, he visited the family of 23-year-old Sean Bell who was killed in Queens on his wedding day. Police fired 50 shots at his car as Bell was leaving a strip club. Bloomberg has called the 50 shots "excessive," but he called for final judgments of the NYPD to be put off until an investigation was completed.

Bloomberg knows that it's important, especially when race might be a factor, to immediately take a public stand against potential police brutality. He also knows that it's important to state the obvious, which in this case is that no matter what else happened, 50 shots is too many. Don't give anyone time to spin the incident otherwise, or misinterpret your silence.

This is the second time in three years that Bloomberg has swiftly and effectively responded to an incident in which the races of those involved played a role in public perception.

The last one was in 2004, when three white men in the Italian neighborhood of Howard Beach severely beat 22-year-old Glenn Moore, who is black, after shouting racial slurs. Bloomberg was in Howard Beach the following morning, denouncing hate crimes of all kinds while vowing to find out what actually happened.

As it turns out, the incident was not black-and-white: there were bad guys and worse guys, but no good guys. The attack was indeed racially motivated, as a jury later decided, but Moore admitted he was in Howard Beach to steal a car. The only good guys were those who vowed to get to the bottom of things despite the hoopla: Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown.

They learned from a similar incident in Howard Beach in 1986, when three black men were chased by white residents from a local pizzeria after being racially taunted, one eventually fleeing onto the Belt Parkway where he was struck by a car and killed. The incident was nasty then — the Reverend Al Sharpton marched down Howard Beach's main artery, Cross Bay Boulevard, shutting it down while white protestors shouted at him — and is nasty now.

Nobody in Howard Beach has forgotten the incident. I worked as a reporter there for three years, and 17 years later, no one had let it go. One day, my best source, a gabby, 40-something white mother of two and community leader with whom I had forged a friendship, turned to me and said, apropos of nothing, "You know, they were drug dealers." I was shocked — not at the allegation, but that she thought it even mattered. The problem was that the loose ends weren't prompty tied up in 1986, and there was never any closure for the community.

These incidents cannot fester. You have to stop them right away to stop the ugly thoughts from becoming part of the fabric of the neighborhood, and the city.

The aftermath of the 50 shots isn't going to be pretty, but it must be managed now so the incident can come and go without becoming a complete disaster for Jamaica, the NYPD, and the city as a whole. Luckily, Bloomberg has taken the right first steps to fix whatever can be salvaged of this mess. --BRYAN JOINER

Comments

[nypdcop]

Contrary to Mayor Bloomberg's rush to judgment, the New York Post has reported that Mr. Bell, who was driving the car, twice tried to run down one of the plains clothes police officers at the scene, which prompted the officers to open fire. Even if the incident was a tragic misunderstanding it is factually wrong and politically irresponsible for Mayor Bloomberg to suggest so strongly at this time that the police officers were at fault.