PRESUMED GUILTY

The death of Sean Bell at the hands of undercover police officers,
who also wounded his two companions in their 50-shot barrage in
Queens nine days ago, brought to mind a case from a few years back in
which undercover cops, acting on bogus information, attacked an
innocent group of young people in a car in Manhattan.

The cops in the Manhattan case assumed that the people in the car
were lowlifes. They were all Ivy League graduates, and one is
currently clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

The incident occurred about 11:30 p.m. on Jan. 10, 2000. Two men and
two women who were running their own startup Internet company,
MagicBeanStalk.com, were parked outside a subway station on East 14th
Street, near Union Square. Without any warning, a plainclothes
officer leaped out of a yellow cab with his gun drawn and rushed the
car with the four young people in it.

Thinking he was being carjacked, the driver put the vehicle in
reverse and tried to get away. He was blocked by an unmarked police
car that had pulled up behind him. He ended up hitting both the
unmarked car and the cab (which was also a police vehicle) in his
unsuccessful effort to flee.

The driver, Jason Rowley, who was 25 at the time, had no idea that
the man with the gun was a cop. "I thought he was going to shoot me,"
he said in an interview last week. "I was trying to get out of there."

The passenger in the front seat, Sheldon Gilbert, said, "We thought
we were going to die, plain and simple."

The first cop was joined by two others, also in plain clothes. The
officers apparently were enraged by Mr. Rowley's effort to get away.
One smashed the window on the driver's side of the car and dragged
Mr. Rowley through it, ripping his thumb in the process. Mr. Gilbert
said his door was yanked open and he was punched in the face and then
dragged from the car. The two men were then beaten.

The two women, Lauren Sudeall and Marie Claire Lim, were in the back
seat, completely terrified. They were taken from the car at gunpoint
and handcuffed. All four occupants were arrested.

It turned out that the cops were acting on a mistaken computer report
that Mr. Rowley's car was stolen. As frightening as the incident was,
the four people in the car were lucky that none of the cops opened
fire. "I spent that night in jail," said Mr. Rowley, "and a lot of
the officers told me that if this had been elsewhere -- for example,
if this has been in the Bronx or Harlem -- I'd have been dead."

As the case was processed, the police learned that the car indeed
belonged to Mr. Rowley, that all four occupants had recently
graduated from college (Mr. Rowley from Brown and the others from
Yale), that Ms. Sudeall was carrying an acceptance letter from
Harvard Law School, and that they had all been coming home from a
long day's work at their company. None of that protected them from
being treated by the police like trash.

Mr. Rowley and Mr. Gilbert are black. Ms. Sudeall is of mixed
parentage, black and white, and Ms. Lim is from the Philippines. The
officers who rushed their car were white.

Jonathan Abady, a lawyer who represented the four in a subsequent
lawsuit (which the city settled), believes that the race of the
victims in that case and in the Sean Bell case -- in which some of
the cops were black -- was a major factor in the way the police behaved.

"Our case was a classic example of disproportionate force being used
against entirely innocent civilians," he said. "It was an example of
egregiously overaggressive police conduct that I think ultimately is
based on stereotypes and perceptions. This case and the shooting of
Sean Bell are examples of a very ignominious history of the police
taking certain liberties, essentially in communities of color. It's
hard to believe that they would have fired 50 shots into a vehicle on
Park Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan."

The four people who were in the car in the Manhattan incident have
since done extremely well. Ms. Sudeall, for example, graduated from
law school and is now a clerk for Justice Stevens. Mr. Gilbert has
established a new Internet venture based on a program he invented
that predicts people's buying patterns online. It's very creepy to
think how easily one or more of the four could have been killed in
their encounter with the police.

As Ms. Sudeall said yesterday, "It seems like it's inviting disaster
to be not in uniform, not showing identification and attacking people
who may or may not have done anything wrong."