A Police Shooting

Sean Bell, 23, had hardly been dead for a day before the usual crowd began calling for the resignation of the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly. While the facts of the police shooting in which Bell was killed are still under investigation, enough is known to make some essential points.

The first is that the officers who shot Bell were risking their own lives to protect the community in which he lived. They were out in the dark and cold early on a holiday weekend morning, monitoring what Mr. Kelly later called an establishment with a "chronic history of narcotics, prostitution and weapons complaints."

The second is that Mr. Kelly himself has far more personal credibility than many of the protesters. This is true both on matters of crime and on the matter of race, which the protesters have a way of injecting even where it isn't relevant. On crime, the reductions attained under Mr. Kelly's leadership have been historic.

While there is plenty of credit to go around — Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg and Governor Pataki and Senator Bruno and the local district attorneys and United States attorneys and FBI agents and some of the tougher judges, not to mention the officers and brass of the NYPD share it — plenty of the credit belongs to Mr. Kelly. His first term as police commissioner was as the appointee of Mayor Dinkins, and he has made a concerted effort to improve relations with minority communities.

As for the protesters, City Council Member Charles Barron has favored freeing the convicted murderer of two police officers, and he hosted the exceptionally brutal dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, at City Hall. As for the Rev. Al Sharpton, after Tawana Brawley, Crown Heights, and Freddy's, he has been left without credibility. Rev. Sharpton, doubtless hoping to re-live the mass arrests of the Giuliani-Diallo days, needs Bell's grieving friends and relatives far more than they need him.

Politically motivated prosecutions of police officers involved in unintended mistakes tend to backfire. Witness the acquittal on all counts in 2000 of the four officers charged with killing Amadou Diallo. The death of any unarmed innocent man at the hands of police is a tragedy that bears serious investigation. But calls for Mr. Kelly's resignation only discredit the protesters.