Mayor To Meet Today on Shooting

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The New York Sun

Mayor Bloomberg will return to the public stage this morning and begin dealing firsthand with a fatal police shooting that has produced tensions that the Reverend Al Sharpton and City Council Member Charles Barron are vowing will culminate on December 6 in a large protest against police brutality.

Mr. Bloomberg and the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, will meet with community members this morning at City Hall to discuss the shooting. Though Mr. Bloomberg was out of town when the incident happened, he has reached out to local politicians and spoken to the woman who was to be wed on Saturday to the man killed in the shooting, a spokesman said.

Yesterday, one day after the fatal police shooting of Sean Bell in Queens, the Rev. Sharpton, a longtime critic of the New York Police Department, called the shooting part of a systemic abuse of power by the department. He spoke with other politicians and black leaders in a park in front of Mary Immaculate Hospital in the Jamaica section of Queens.

City Council members Charles Barron and James Sanders, Jr., called for Mr. Kelly to resign.

Other city politicians took a more cautionary stance about the shooting, saying they would wait for the results of the investigation before making a judgment.

“It’s a tragedy,” a council member and chairman of the Public Safety Committee, Peter Vallone, Jr., said. “But our police are forced to make split-second, life-or-death decisions almost every day.”

Rev. Sharpton predicted, “This is going to be a watershed case.” He said that after the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx, the NYPD disbanded the street crime unit. He said he wanted a similar system-wide change in response to Bell’s death.

“We cannot allow this to happen,” Rev. Sharpton said. “This man should be on his honeymoon with his wife this morning. … We’re not going to stop until we get an answer.”

Rev. Sharpton led the crowd in several count-offs to 50, the number of bullets fired by police at the car driven by Bell, 23, who was killed, and his two friends, Joseph Guzman, 21, and Trent Benefield, 23.

Mr. Guzman was in critical condition at Mary Immaculate Hospital with 11 bullet wounds yesterday, and Mr. Benefield was listed as stable with three bullet wounds. Bell was pronounced dead at the hospital after the incident. He was shot four times.

The three men were leaving Bell’s bachelor party at Kalua Cabaret on 95th Avenue at about 4 a.m. on Saturday when the shooting occurred, according to a police account. An undercover detective, who was investigating possible illegal activities at the club, followed the men after they got into a dispute with another man outside the bar. Based on earlier comments that the detective heard, including one of the men allegedly saying, “Yo, go get my gun,” the detective believed at least one of the men was armed, police said.

According to police, the men then got into a Nissan Altima and drove into the undercover officer, hitting him in the shin, before crashing into a minivan with two police officers inside, police said. The car then reversed onto the sidewalk and into a garage gate, before going forward and crashing into the minivan again, police said. The two officers in the minivan fired 34 shots, including one 12-year-veteran who fired his gun 31 times, stopping to re-load once. Two officers and a lieutenant in a Toyota Camry fired a total of five times. The undercover officer fired 11 times, police said. No weapon was found at the scene, but police said they were investigating whether a fourth person fled during the shooting.

The five police officers involved with the shooting have had their guns confiscated and put on paid administrative leave until further notice, a spokesman for the police, Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Paul Browne, said. The Queens District Attorney, Richard Brown, is conducting an investigation into the shooting.

Police officers are not allowed to shoot at or from a moving vehicle “unless deadly force is being used against the police officers or another person present by means other than a moving vehicle,” according to the NYPD patrol guide.

Bell was going to marry his high school girlfriend, Nicole Paultre, 22, on Saturday at 5 p.m. He has two daughters with Ms. Paultre, Jada, 3, and Jordyn, who is five months old. He worked most recently as a milk deliveryman, but had aspirations of becoming a professional baseball player, friends said. After the marriage he planned on taking his family to Atlanta, where his father-in-law had promised to buy them a house.

“Everyone is devastated,”a cousin of Bell’s, Kinglarry Crawford, 35, said. “Some can’t even talk right now. They’re speechless.”

Many of the speakers invoked the 1999 case of Diallo, who was shot 41 times by police, as a comparison to Bell’s shooting. Diallo, who was unarmed, was shot and killed by four officers who allegedly mistook him for a serial rapist as he reached for his wallet. A Bronx grand jury indicted the four officers in the Diallo case on 2nd degree murder, but a jury acquitted the officers of all counts in 2000.

The godfather of Mr. Guzman, Greg Jones, said the incident had shaken his faith in the police department. His father was an officer in the 79th precinct.

“I am disgusted at being the son of a member of the New York Police Department with them shooting us down like this,” he said.

The bishop of the church where Bell was to be married, Lester Williams, led the crowd in a prayer vigil before the families of the victims marched around the hospital arm in arm. One group of protesters then broke off and marched up Jamaica Avenue to the 103rd precinct, where they rallied before a wall of police officers and listened to more speeches. The protesters blocked traffic, but police facilitated the march and no arrests were made yesterday.

The families of the three men went to the Community Church of Christ for a 3 p.m. memorial service, where Ms. Paultre officially joined the congregation, Mr. Crawford said. Bell’s funeral is expected for Friday. Rev. Sharpton and Mr. Barron said they would hold a large anti-police brutality rally outside One Police Plaza on December 6. In the aftermath of the Diallo shooting, which took place during the Giuliani administration and under a different police commissioner, such rallies were regular occurrences, with Rev. Sharpton and many politicians and activists getting themselves arrested in acts of civil disobedience.


The New York Sun

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