Diallo

Imagine being a 22 year old immigrant, standing in the vestibule of your apartment, scanning the neighborhood by looking up and down the street. Suddenly, four men jump out of a car, guns out, running toward you. What would you do? Pull your keys out, turn and run trying to to enter your apartment? Pull your wallet out to give it to them? Or stand calmly and wait to see what they wanted? According to the attorneys defending the four men, any reaction other than standing calmly and waiting for the men running at you to explain themselves, justifies them leveling forty-one shots at you, hitting you nineteen times , killing you in front of your own building.

On February 4, 1999 that was the fate of Amadou Diallo, a black man from West Guinea, when he was confronted by four white plain-clothes NYPD Street Crimes Unit (SCU) officers in the Bronx. Diallo , unarmed and with no criminal record, was pronounced dead at the scene. The "incident" according to the officers, was the result of Diallo's furtive behavior and movements, when he reportedly pulled something out of his pocket, later which was identified as his black nylon wallet. The officers stated they were afraid for their lives. The "crime" , the murder of an unarmed black man ,according to the media, was the result of a Street Crimes Unit which was out of control, lawless and who's members had come to believe that they were above the law. Racial profiling , police brutality, the lack of rights for minorities and quelling the promises of the Constitution were all factors in this unnecessary death.The four officers Sean Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss, Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy would be eventually charged in the death of Diallo and stand trial for their actions. According to the New York Times, in 1997, amid civilian complaints of lawlessness and lack of safety on the streets of New York , the SCU was increased from 150 to 380 officers. (NYT 4/19/2000) Street Crimes officers worked city-wide, and their main goal was to remove illegal guns and drugs from the streets of New York. Time Magazine characterized the SCU as follows:

The SCU's motto said much: We Own the Night. The unit had been expanded, perhaps too quickly, from 150 undercover officers to nearly 400. Recruits were given only three days of intensive training. The unit belonged to no precinct and was based on one of the

islets in the East River, isolated from every borough but having the freedom of the city to search, frisk and arrest. It had been tremendously successful. Though making up less than 1% of the police force, the SCU accounted for more than 40% of the city's gun arrests,

reducing the number of weapons by more than 2,000. The murder rate plummeted. But

the unit's arrests came at a huge social cost: in 1997 and 1998 it stopped and searched 45,000 men, mostly African Americans and Hispanics, in order to make slightly more than 9,000arrests. (Chua-Eoan, 12)

Clearly , these statistics suggest that the cops felt they needed little in the way of probable cause to stop and frisk someone. The reinforcement of this atmosphere of suspicion caused conflict not only between the officers and criminals , but also between the officers and law abiding citizens with the wrong skin color or in the wrong place. Looking up and down the street, becomes a "suspicious and furtive" action to the officers, and all encounters become encounters with potential criminals. Functionalists would see the officers as providing safety in the streets, but at some point , their function changed to only keeping themselves safe. They then become a deviant group, these four officers , and perhaps the entire SCU. Their group , an elite police unit, was lead to believe that stopping and frisking people without probable cause was in fact the norm within their group. This idea was continually reinforced when they were praised for getting guns off the streets, and their methods were ignored. The problem was that at some point they would have rounded up all the guns on the street that were easy to get, and they would have to use more and more aggressive behavior to continue their success. It was kind of a gun "law of diminishing returns". Their flaunting of constitutional rights was in fact criminal behavior that was learned in their group. There was the requisite lack of moral regulation in their group that functionalists would require for them to resort to crime, as well as the structural tension brought about by the need for their unit's continued success. They became their own subculture of violence. Interactionists would see the isolation of the SCU as a factor in their behavior , they are a separate group from the NYPD, and as such there is a learned behavior of "criminality" within the group. But they would also wait to see the outcome of the trial before declaring the killing as deviant or criminal behavior. In fact, they believe that no act is inherently deviant and that society defines what is and is not deviant. So it would require society , through the courts to declare that the officers acted in a criminal way. The labeling theory that some interactionists use to understand criminality , states that people are deviants because others label them so, it is not their acts that are deviant , but rather the subsequent label of deviance given to them by people in authority that makes them so. These sociologists would point out that the officers were "people who represent the forces of law and order....(and)do most of the labeling " (Giddens et al, 140) . This would lessen the chance of their behavior being considered deviant. Conflict theorists would see the SCU as an arm of those in political power , such as Mayor Giuliani and the police chief who were trying to keep the power. Giuliani 's seemingly successful policies regarding getting tough on crime had brought him accolades and national attention. But it became a conflict between wealthy and privileged New Yorkers who wanted a mayor who could keep the streets safe and the poor and minority classes that had their civil rights continually violated by the tactics of officers like those in the SCU. Conflict theorists argue that, the " laws are tools the powerful use to maintain their privileged positions". (Ibid, 141) This seemed to be the case in 1999 in New York City.

The citizens of New York fueled by its media appeared to have reached the breaking point. They had had enough. First the brutal beating of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a police station in 1997, and now the killing of an innocent, unarmed man. The two functions of deviant behavior introduced by Emile Durknheim were about to be fulfilled. First adaptive function, the deviance perpetrated by the four officers

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