Prometheus 6

It's still damn near always a Black man on the wrong end of a fussilade of bullets. And in this specific case, Undercover Mike still emptied his weapon, reloaded and emptied it again, all without being sure he fired at all.

Yes, There’s the Trial, but There Are Also Broader Statistics
By CLYDE HABERMAN

Inevitably, emotions ran high this week with the start of the trial in the 50-shot police killing of Sean Bell. That much was obvious in protests outside the courthouse in Queens. It was obvious in angry comments posted on blogs.

For some New Yorkers, the entire Police Department stands in the dock with the three indicted detectives, branded as out of control.

Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to step back from the Bell case for a dispassionate look at some numbers. They show that notwithstanding disasters like the shooting of unarmed men like Mr. Bell or Amadou Diallo, New York City police officers as a group are more restrained than ever in drawing their guns.

This is true regardless of which category is examined: incidents in which guns were drawn, shots fired, civilians wounded or, worst, civilians killed. The figures for all are well below what they were years and decades ago.

“They’re consistently going down,” said Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, a New York group that studies crime and police procedures. “It’s not as though we’ve had a couple of dips. They’re going down year after year after year.”

This phenomenon is not unique to New York. In many American cities, “we’ve seen fairly substantial declines across the board in police shootings,” said Prof. Michael D. White, a former deputy sheriff in eastern Pennsylvania who teaches policing at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Even so, one statistic kept by the New York Police Department suggests that officers here are far less likely to kill than their counterparts elsewhere.

In 2006, the year of Mr. Bell’s death, New York had 0.36 lethal police shootings for each 1,000 officers on the force. To cite a few other cities, Phoenix that year had 3.79, Philadelphia 3.34, Detroit 1.90, Los Angeles 1.39 and Chicago 1.11.