10 Years Later, Diallo Shooting Still Shaping NYPD
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In the 10-year wake of Amadou Diallo's tragic death, the NYPD has changed its policies in an effort to prevent similar incidents from happening again. NY1's Amanda Farinacci filed the following report.Ten years after Amadou Diallo's death, changes have come to the New York City Police Department. Professor Eugene O'Donnell at John Jay College of Criminal Justice says those changes have come from the top.
"I think there's been a message sent from the mayor and this commissioner that's dramatically different than what we saw 10 years ago, that's a low water mark in terms of police community relations," said O'Donnell.
Amadou Diallo
After the Diallo shooting, the department worked to strengthen community relations in each precinct and dismantled the aggressive street crime unit, which the four officers who shot Diallo belonged to.
The number of incidents where police weapons were fired has also dropped significantly. In 1999, the year Diallo was killed, there were 155 such incidents. In 2007, the last year for which numbers are available, the number had fallen to 111. In what the NYPD calls "adversarial conflict", the numbers fell from 61 to 45.
A spokesperson for the NYPD, while declining to speak on camera, said the department has the lowest ratio of fatal police involved shootings of any major police department in the U.S.
"In terms of the use of deadly force, the NYPD is a pretty restrained agency," said O'Donnell.
Despite those numbers, there are critics, including Marq Claxton of the group "100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care".
"As far as action or change in a positive direction, or efforts that built the confidence or trust of the community in the police department, there's been no substantive increase in that area," said Claxton.
Claxton points to the Sean Bell shooting in November 2006.
Bell died in a hail of fifty police bullets, and the officers involved, like those in the Diallo case, were acquitted. Claxton says the numbers don't mean much to the families of victims.
"They can all tell you that the statistical justification by the police department does nothing to provide these families justice," said Claxton.
Both sides agree that diversity within the ranks of NYPD matters. The department has focused on this, saying one of every five graduates in the last eight police academy classes was foreign born -- something they hope will make a difference in the long run.