WE ALLOW IT TO HAPPEN

NEW YORK - Forty-one bullets. Nineteen of them hit a West African
immigrant named Amadou Diallo, 22, who was mowed down -- literally the
case -- in the Bronx last week. The killers were four policemen from
the storied Street Crimes Unit. When it was all over, it was
determined that Diallo was armed only with a black complexion. He
apparently had no weapon.

Almost instantly, everyone took their assigned roles. The mayor called
the killing ``a tragedy,'' but pleaded with everyone to await the
outcome of the investigation being conducted by the Bronx district
attorney. Al Sharpton organized a City Hall demonstration, some civil
libertarians voiced concern about ``cowboy cops,'' but the rest of the
city, as is its wont, went on with its business -- which is, as we all
know, the business of making money.

I should spare New York some of my acrid sarcasm because it is, when
you think about it, typical of other cities. It has made a pretty
basic decision which goes something like this: In the greater cause of
justice, it will put up with some injustice. Specifically, that means
it will not too closely inquire how the Street Crimes Unit, with less
than 2 percent of the NYPD's officers, makes 40 percent of the
department's gun arrests. They have to be awfully aggressive and,
occasionally, something goes wrong.

Let us talk about China and human rights. When we do, someone delivers
a lecture about how we and they see things differently. We are
concerned with the individual -- ``all men are created equal,'' etc.
- -- while they care only about society as a whole. Individuals don't
matter, which is why they lock up people for mere political dissent
and we, in sincere horror, voice our indignation.

But think for a moment: Don't we do something similar when it comes to
crime? New York City is but one example. Skip to Chicago and something
that happened there recently -- the exoneration of a man who had spent
16 years on death row. Anthony Porter was freed after some crackerjack
Northwestern University journalism students concluded he could not
have been the killer -- and got someone else, Alstory Simon, to
confess on videotape.

For Illinois, Porter was the 10th person released from death row since
1977, when the death penalty was reinstated. Florida leads the nation
with 18 such cases since 1973. Common sense -- not to mention the
laws of probability -- suggest that innocent people have been executed
and will be executed. It cannot be that every mistake is uncovered or
every police frame-up revealed. Deep down, we all know that -- and
know further that the assertion by death penalty proponents that the
system is mistake-proof is wrong.

And yet this is a price we are willing to pay -- those of us, that is,
who delude ourselves into thinking that the death penalty deters
crime. We will put up with the inevitable execution of an innocent
person so that the rest of us are somehow made to feel safer.
Similarly, we will countenance a certain amount of police brutality if
(1) it's someone else who's getting bopped on the head and (2) we feel
it contributes to making the streets safer.

How Chinese of us.