Learning From Bell

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

One of the items that caught our eye on the wires yesterday was the announcement of the results of a survey on the justice system and race relations in America that was issued by a Web site called BlackPlanet.com. It found that in the case of the killing of Sean Bell in Queens, 51% of its respondents “feel that this is another example of the police profiling African American men.” It wasn’t the most definitive of surveys, but it caught our eye because it comes at a time when at least some protesters — and even members of the City Council — are raising the racism issue. Yet we would hazard a guess that when the Bell case is all sorted out, what it is going to show is something quite the opposite — such as just how complex these questions have become.

“We know that the shooting was not motivated by racism because we know that the officer who fired first was black,” Commissioner Kelly said in a statement forwarded to the Sun yesterday. That doesn’t automatically exclude the possibility of tangential racism. But it underscores how the ground has shifted. As does the question of why the officers were investigating a club patronized mainly by blacks. It turns out, according to the NYPD, that there were 28 emergency 911 calls from the predominantly black club in the previous 12 months alone. The notion that police are responding to such calls in black areas as well as in white areas will be seen, we predict, as, whatever else it might be, the opposite of racism and a step in the right direction.

The police department reckons that more than 60% of the victims of all murders, rapes, assaults, and robberies in New York City are black. So it is not surprising that, as the police department also reports, black residents call for help more often than anyone else when it comes to violent crime in particular. The team — what the NYPD calls the club enforcement team that tried to shut down the Club Kalua where Sean Bell had been socializing — was composed of black and white officers. Some 30% of the NYPD’s workforce is black. Over the last few years, black and Hispanic recruits have outnumbered their white counterparts at Police Academy graduations. And the top brass of the department has, certainly during the years Commissioner Kelly has been running it, increased the promotion of African-Americans to posts beyond the rank of captain.

Neither we nor, so far as we can tell, the NYPD would suggest that racism is not a problem in New York City or the nation. It has been and remains an enormous problem. It will take generations to purge, and no let-up in the effort is appropriate. But the unfolding facts in the Bell case suggest that the problem that resulted in a death in Queens was something other than racism and that the reforms that are likely to come out of the shooting of Sean Bell are likely to have less to do with racism and more to do with tactics of police work. We are at a time when all the way up and down the chain of command — and in most of the political arena — people want to learn how to do the right thing.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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