50 BULLETS AND A DEATH IN QUEENS

Much has changed in New York since Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African
immigrant, was killed in a hail of 41 bullets fired by city police
officers in 1999. Mr. Diallo's death sent racial tensions in the city
nearly to a boiling point -- helped along by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,
who regularly shunned meetings with black leaders and failed to treat
the crisis with the urgency it required.

Now Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond
Kelly, are dealing differently with their own Diallo-style disaster.
Police officers firing 50 rounds early last Saturday killed Sean Bell,
an unarmed man who was to have married his high school sweetheart
later in the day. The mayor and the commissioner moved quickly to
answer questions and to hear the concerns of the victim's family and
the community. But their responsiveness will not bring back Sean Bell.
The challenge here is far greater than good communications.

The officers who killed Mr. Bell were part of a sting operation at a
Queens nightclub suspected of narcotics, prostitution and weapons
violations. According to published reports, the officers have said
that as Mr. Bell and his friends left the club and headed toward their
car, an undercover detective heard one of them say he was going to get
a gun. They also reportedly said that when the men entered the car,
the detective pulled his gun and identified himself, but the car
suddenly gunned forward, hit him in the shin and then struck an
unmarked police minivan. The officers then opened fire.

The tragedy may simply involve two sets of very frightened men who
reacted instinctively to what they thought was imminent danger. But
only one of the sets was armed. There was no gun in the car, nor on
the shooting victims, who sat helpless inside while five police
officers began firing 50 rounds at them. One emptied his gun, a 9mm
semiautomatic, reloaded and emptied it again, accounting for 31
rounds. The shooting appears to have been frantic, with bullets
shattering windows as far away as the AirTrain station, hundreds of
yards from the scene. Two of Mr. Bell's companions were injured;
miraculously, there were no other casualties.

Unlike the Diallo tragedy, the officers involved in the Queens
shooting were not all white. They were also not inexperienced. The
first bullet came from an officer with five years on the job, and the
detective who fired the 31 rounds had 12. But it is hard to explain
their actions as anything but panic.

Police rules mandate that an officer pause after firing three rounds
to assess the situation. If the shooters had followed procedures, they
might have seen there was no threat before it was too late. Mayor
Bloomberg has rightly called for a quick and impartial investigation.
The officers must be held accountable for what has happened. But the
Police Department must also confront the fact that a disaster that
everyone swore to prevent seven years ago has repeated itself in Queens.