NYC DIALLO, TERRORISM AND THE CHOICE OF SAFETY VS. LIBERTY

ODD as it may seem, Amadou Diallo came to mind yesterday as New York sifted
through the physical and emotional rubble of the World Trade Center nightmare.

It wasn't so much the terrible way that Mr. Diallo was killed, in a burst
of 41 bullets fired by four nervous, and arguably ill-trained, police
officers. What came to mind was a related issue that his death in 1999 came
to crystallize.

In the name of law and order, how much license do we give the police to
stop and question citizens whose sole "crime" is to have been standing on
the street or, as in the Diallo case, in the vestibules of their apartment
buildings? Hand in hand with this issue is racial profiling and all the
emotional levers that the phrase pulls.

What does any of that have to do with the worst terrorist attack in
American history? Simply this: It is quite possible that America will have
to decide, and fairly soon, how much license it wants to give law
enforcement agencies to stop ordinary people at airports and border
crossings, to question them at perhaps irritating length about where they
have been, where they are heading and what they intend to do once they get
where they're going. It would probably surprise no one if ethnic profiling
enters the equation to some degree.

The prevailing ethic, certainly in post-Diallo New York City, is that
profiling on the basis of race, religion, ethnic background and so on is
inherently evil. Try to find a mayoral candidate who doesn't practically
equate it with original sin. It seems pretty clear that the political
scales have tipped in the last few years in favor of civil libertarians who
say that the police have to explain themselves a good deal more than they
once did if they are to continue stopping people on the street and frisking
them.

But it is sometimes easy to forget, in the safer city of the Giuliani era,
how traumatized New Yorkers were by crime a decade ago, when 2,000 or more
people were murdered each year. For many, they were victims of terrorism in
another guise. And they were more than prepared to toss the Constitution to
the wind if it meant clearing the streets of the crack dealers and
gun-toting gang bangers whose bullets were flying through apartment windows
and killing babies in their cribs.

Now that the number of murders has been reduced to a less frightening 600
or 650 a year -- thanks in part, many experts on police matters say, to
stop-and-frisk strategies that removed a lot of guns from the streets --
the New York pendulum has swung the other way, toward greater emphasis on
the civil-libertarian arguments.

"We have never thrown out civil liberties altogether, but the balance line
moves," said Fred Siegel, a history professor at Cooper Union.

Arguably, one of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's political failings was that he
had a blind spot in this regard, and did not see the line move as New
Yorkers were finally able to exhale, in good measure because of his
crime-fighting policies. But if that is so, then the fundamentalist civil
libertarians -- those who, for example, fought metal detectors in public
places as an invasion of privacy -- may now be the ones with a blind spot.

New Yorkers, not to mention other Americans, may be ready to accept
intrusive law enforcement tactics -- and, yes, possibly with elements of
profiling attached -- that they would have deemed repugnant just two days
ago, before the World Trade Center collapsed and bodies fell from the sky.

THIS raises a whole question about what the trade-offs are going to be,"
acknowledged Ruth W. Messinger, who lost to Mr. Giuliani in the 1997
mayoral election and who joined the protests against his policies after the
Diallo killing. "We've been so isolated from this," she said, referring to
the terrorism that has caused America's knees to buckle.

To the extent that politics and policy cannot be entirely separated from
the personalities of our leaders, Mr. Giuliani has demonstrated anew in
this crisis what a dominant force he is, and how he is likely to remain so
as his days in office dwindle down. He has displayed, most New Yorkers
would probably agree, perfect pitch these last few days. He has been
decisive, dignified and yet obviously brokenhearted over the enormous loss
of life.

This is a man who in 1994 gave a speech on the unwritten compact that he
believes exists between the governed and the political figures who guide
them. "Freedom is about authority," Mr. Giuliani said then. "Freedom is
about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful
authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it."

That speech has often been cited by critics as proof that the mayor is at
heart an authoritarian. Maybe they are right. But as a wounded New York
mourns its unburied dead, and turns to its mayor for solace, those words
from 1994 may find more understanding ears than the civil libertarians
could have imagined.