YOU CAN'T SHOOT PEOPLE JUST FOR TALKING BACK TO YOU

LET'S ASSUME FOR A moment that every bad thing that's been said about
Patrick Dorismond was true. That he smoked marijuana, that he once
threatened a man with a gun he didn't have. That he punched a guy for
shortchanging him on a marijuana sale and punched his girlfriend while she
was holding their child.

Let's accept New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's charge that Dorismond spent a
good deal of his adult life punching people (although there's no proof of
this), and the cops' story that Dorismond lunged at Detective Anthony
Vasquez's gun.

Even if all this is true, it doesn't explain why Vasquez drew his gun in the
first place on a man involved in a commonplace street brawl, which was
instigated by the police, over a crime that was never committed and that, at
most, would have been a misdemeanor.

Two lawyers and one former police officer have explained to me the law on
the use of deadly force. Police officers are justified in using deadly force
only when their lives or someone else's is threatened, or to prevent someone
from committing or fleeing the scene of a violent crime. Pulling a gun on
somebody just because that person ticked you off is not in the rule book.

In New York City, we've now reached the point where police officers
apparently feel it's all right to shoot people for the crime of talking back
or for trying to finish a fight the cops started. Men go after each other
physically all the time, over matters serious and trivial.

Now we're being told that, in a fight with an unarmed civilian, a cop is
permitted to even the score by shooting him. It's an issue of power, says
Michael Letwin, president of New York City's Association of Legal Aid
Attorneys. "Police feel that any hint of resistance, not necessarily even
physical, just someone standing up for themselves, is intolerable. They feel
that violence is justified when anyone doesn't immediately do what they're
ordered to do."

If so, then the officers we pay to keep our neighborhoods safe have become
roving death squads, with absolute power over us.

Trevor Garel understands this mind-set. The 62-year-old is a semi-retired
criminal-defense lawyer and a former prosecutor. He was also a New York City
cop for 17 years. He had a regular beat, worked undercover in narcotics, was
on the vice squad, conducted investigations as a detective, and investigated
applicants for the police department before leaving the force for Yale Law
School in 1978. When he was a cop, his bosses advised him to pull his gun
only if he planned to use it. Now, he observes, officers pull their guns on
a regular basis, even for traffic stops.

"The mind-set is, I'm going to show you who has the upper hand. This is our
street, and we're going to show you, dammit, who's boss out here," Garel
says.

There are several versions of what happened between Dorismond and the police
the night he was killed. Everyone agrees that three officers approached
Dorismond and fellow security guard Kevin Kaiser on Eighth Avenue, asked to
buy drugs, and were told to get lost. Dorismond was particularly upset about
being mistaken for a drug dealer, and said so. An argument and punches
followed. Each side says the other threw the first punch. Dorismond was shot
by a bullet from Vasquez' gun. Vasquez claims the gun went off when
Dorismond lunged at it.

Former detective Garel wonders why the officers didn't move on after their
offer to buy drugs was rebuffed. "Cops are taught to continue to be
aggressive if you're an undercover agent trying to purchase narcotics," he
says. "If you push it enough, if you seem legit, then the sale will be made.
On the other hand, they're told that, if the situation starts to escalate,
they should move on. That's where the macho thing comes in. It's: I'm a man.
You're not going to tell me what to do -- especially if there's more than
one officer. We've got to show you that nobody talks to us that way."

If that's how this wretched scenario went down, and there are indications
that it is, then we're at a dangerous place in the city.

The police in Giuliani's police department are driven by quotas and by the
constant need for new arrests, increasingly for more and more low-level
crimes. Add the quest for bodies to officers whose guns seem to be drawn on
a whim and to go off by accident, and you have someone else dead on the
street. No one says being a police officer is easy, but if you can't handle
the pressure, you should leave the job. You can't be allowed to shoot people
for talking back.