FATAL SHOOTINGS BY POLICE: HARD TO INVESTIGATE, EVEN HARDER TO PROSECUTE

With Sean Bell now eulogized and buried, the emotions surrounding his
death are swirling around the investigation into whether police
officers committed a crime when they fired 50 bullets into Mr. Bell's
car.

Although every investigation is different, cases like that of Mr.
Bell, an unarmed black man who was killed on his wedding day, have
come to follow a similar rhythm and pattern. And experts and those
involved in the investigation say that through the history of those
cases, they have learned that it is very difficult to convince a grand
jury or a trial jury that police officers, who are empowered to defend
the public with deadly force if necessary, went too far. In many cases
of police shootings, with tensions high, the facts and legal fine
points are difficult to isolate from a much larger context.

"What makes these cases so hard are issues that go well beyond the
incident itself," a high-ranking official in the office of Richard A.
Brown, the Queens district attorney, said last week, speaking on
condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

"It's the racial tension that still exists in the city," the official
continued. "It's the mistrust in the minority community. It's cops
that are faced with danger every day and have to react in seconds.
It's safe to say, if they're wrong, somebody dies" -- whether a
civilian or an officer.

Everyone involved knows the stakes. While the district attorney's
office investigates, civil rights activists and lawyers for the
victims and the police officers are struggling to shape public opinion
and find witnesses who buttress their points of view.

At a news conference yesterday at the scene of the shooting, some of
those people called for an independent prosecutor, saying that a
district attorney should not be investigating a police department he
regularly deals with.

"They work with the cops on a daily basis, and they have a conflict of
interest," said Norman Siegel, a civil rights lawyer, at the news
conference yesterday. He described the shooting as "an enormous minefield."

But Mr. Brown said in a statement yesterday that calls for a special
prosecutor "are neither helpful nor productive -- nor are they in any
respect justified." He said earlier that his investigation would be
"independent of that being conducted by the Police
Department."

One official involved in the investigation said that Mr. Brown had
asked his chief of homicide to prepare a list of what was needed to
move forward, and had passed it on to police. The list contained about
30 items, like autopsy and toxicology reports; 911 and radio
transmission tapes; hospital reports for both the civilians and the
police officers involved in the shooting; ballistics reports; the
criminal histories, if any, of witnesses; and photos or videos taken
by civilians or the police. Mr. Brown has said several times that the
investigation is in its earliest stages and it remains unclear what
the inquiry and testimony before the grand jury will show. But the
investigation will focus sharply on what occurred in the minutes
leading up to the shooting, and in those frenzied seconds when the
officers fired 50 bullets at a car, killing Mr. Bell, the groom, and
wounding two friends as they left the Club Kalua, a strip club in
Jamaica, nine days ago.

The recent history in such cases is mixed.

In the case of Amadou Diallo, fired on 41 times by the police as he
stood in his Bronx vestibule in 1999, four officers were tried on
criminal charges, including second-degree murder and manslaughter, and
acquitted. In the case of Patrick M. Dorismond, killed in Manhattan in
March 2000 during a scuffle with an undercover narcotics detective who
said he thought the man was a drug dealer, a grand jury declined to
indict.

But a year ago, a State Supreme Court justice convicted Bryan Conroy,
an undercover officer, of criminally negligent homicide in the death
of Ousmane Zongo, shot during a raid in a Chelsea warehouse.

"When you listen to people in the community talk about a case like
this, it doesn't take long before the conversation goes well beyond
the incident in question," said the official in the Queens district
attorney's office. "It goes to other incidents in the past. It goes
quite frankly to the general interaction between cops and people in
the community."

Michael Hardy, who along with Sanford A. Rubenstein is representing
the shot men's families, said they had not ruled out seeking a federal
civil rights investigation, but he said the evidence of racial bias
was not clear-cut. Of the officers who fired on Mr. Bell's car, two
are black, one is black and Hispanic, and two are white.

The police pursuing the inquiry are playing a complex role. On the one
hand, they profess impartiality; on the other hand, they are put in
the position of investigating their colleagues' own conduct while
showing that they take a stand against excessive violence.

The investigators will knock on doors at different times of the day
and different days of the week to try to find everyone who may have
seen or heard something early that Saturday, one official involved in
the investigation said. "Ideally, you want to know as much as you can
know before you talk to the key witnesses," another official said.

But to a large degree, investigators for Mr. Brown will be working
parallel with the Police Department, which is conducting an internal
investigation and may have already knocked on the same doors.

One of the issues the district attorney is considering, the official
in Mr. Brown's office said, is at what point a mistake by police
officers becomes a criminal act. The answer, prosecutors say, is more
complicated than a layman might expect, because state law gives police
somewhat more latitude in using deadly force than it gives civilians.

Mr. Bell, 23, and the two wounded men -- Joseph Guzman, 31, shot at
least 11 times, and Trent Benefield, 23, hit three times -- were not
armed, and no gun was found. But moments before the shooting started,
an undercover detective outside the strip club heard one man in Mr.
Bell's party say, "Yo, get my gun," according to a person briefed on
the detective's account.

The detective said he positioned himself in front of the car,
identified himself as an officer -- a point lawyers for the victims
dispute -- and ordered the men to show their hands. After Mr. Bell
clipped the officer with his car and rammed into a minivan where other
officers were waiting, the detective began to shoot, said the person
briefed on his account.

Police officials have acknowledged that the conduct of the undercover
detective -- for example, in taking action rather than relying on
backup, and in firing at a moving car -- was unusual.

"This is a real question," one official involved in the inquiry said.
"But it doesn't mean that what the undercover did was bad."

This official said that some of the five officers who fired shots
probably faced greater potential criminal liability than others.
Although the number of shots fired has provoked outrage, 50 shots can
be squeezed off in a matter of seconds, making the number of bullets
fired less important than what started the shooting.

"There is nothing in the law that says you can use deadly force but
only fire a certain number of shots," that official said. "The number
of bullets is certainly startling to the general public, but the key
question is why was the first shot fired by each of them.

"You can't view this as monolithic," the official said. "It's five
individuals who made five individual decisions.

"The most important thing is the first shot," he said, "not that the
others aren't important. But the most important is the first shot."

The perception of the officer firing the first shot -- whether he felt
his life was in danger -- will weigh more heavily than what Mr. Bell
and his companions inside the car saw or heard, lawyers said. "It's a
twofold test," Kyle B. Watters, a criminal defense lawyer, said.
"First you look at the subjective part: What does the officer believe
from what he sees? Then you put against that, what would a reasonable
person believe?"

Investigators will also look at the tactical plan for the unit on the
night of the shooting, the official in the district attorney's office
said.

When the grand jury gets the case, another question is if the officers
will testify, and if so, what they will say.

Philip E. Karasyk, the lawyer representing the undercover detective
who fired the first shots, and whose name has not been publicly
disclosed, said that he intended to have his client speak voluntarily
to the prosecutors, and testify without immunity to the grand jury
because he wanted the panel members to hear the man's story from his
own mouth.

"I want people to understand exactly what he was experiencing and why
he did what he did," Mr. Karasyk said. "There is no better way to know
what was going in someone's mind than to have them get up there and
tell you. Then they can judge his credibility. I want him to put the
grand jurors in his shoes and to recreate what he was experiencing at
the time, because, unless you've been there, you have no idea what
it's like."

Stephen L. Worth, the lawyer for Michael Carey, a white backup officer
who fired three times, said that his client had not yet decided
whether to testify before the grand jury. "We're keeping our options
open," Mr. Worth said. "The truth is the truth, and it's really a
matter of when it will come out. It may be at the grand jury. It may
be talking to investigators."