March 31, 2000

Confrontational police tactics endanger the public
Study finds that reckless police practices led to shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York

The controversial killing of an unarmed immigrant in February 1999 by the New York Police Department was neither an act of racist violence nor a fluke accident, concludes a Cato Institute study released today. Instead, the killing of Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old West African immigrant, was the worst-case scenario of a reckless, confrontational style of policing, according to Timothy Lynch, director of Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice.

Plainclothes officers who regularly brandish pistols and harshly confront city residents in the middle of the night are a recipe for disaster, Lynch maintains. Such tactics carry extraordinarily high risk for officers, suspects and bystanders, and the death or serious injury of an innocent person was just a matter of time, Lynch says.

In "‘We Own the Night’: Amadou Diallo’s Deadly Encounter with New York City’s Street Crimes Unit," Lynch shows that the legal shield of false imprisonment--which protects citizens from being unjustifiably detained--has been sharply curtailed in recent years by Supreme Court rulings that have expanded the power of the police to employ "stop-and-frisk" tactics. In 1994 Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and then-police commissioner William Bratton exploited those precedents by ordering the elite Street Crimes Unit to start confiscating illegal firearms from pedestrians. Thus began an aggressive campaign of searching city residents.

The number of gun seizures increased, but so did the number of illegal searches. In 1998, for example, 18,000 such cases were thrown out by prosecutors--double the number in 1994. Others were thrown out by the judiciary at the preliminary stage of trial proceedings.

Minorities bore the brunt of the "stop-and-frisk" campaign because the authorities chose to exercise their search power in poor minority neighborhoods where crime rates tend to be high. Since wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods were largely unaffected by the campaign, minority complaints about police harassment were written off as meritless or overblown--at least until Diallo’s death.

Reform proposals such as the hiring of more minorities by the NYPD and a city residence requirement for police officers fail to address the underlying problem. If the objective is to reduce the likelihood of incidents such as the Diallo shooting, Lynch says, "the best solution is to end the confrontational stop-and-frisk tactics of the police department.

"‘We Own the Night’: Amadou Diallo’s Deadly Encounter with New York City’s Street Crimes Unit"