The Second Casualty in Gotham

_"Diallo Truth, Diallo Falsehood" by Heather Mac Donald, in City Journal (Summer 1999), Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017._

A tragic police killing last February had New York City in an uproar for months. But the crisis was a phony one—"manufactured" by the press, particularly the New York Times, contends Mac Donald, a contributing editor of City Journal.

The slaying was indeed "horrific," she notes. Four undercover police officers in the elite Street Crime Unit, looking for an armed rapist in the Bronx, mistakenly shot a street peddler named Amadou Diallo 41 times— and he turned out to be unarmed. From this incident, as well as the protests and government investigations that followed, the Times, Mac Donald asserts, "created a wholly misleading portrait of a city under siege—not by criminals, but by the police. In so doing, it exacerbated the police-minority tensions it purported merely to describe." And it cast doubt on the methods the city has used in recent years under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to bring about a drastic reduction in crime.

The Times coverage—which averaged 3.5 articles a day over the first two months—rested on "the unquestioned assumption... that the Diallo shooting was a glaring example of pervasive police misconduct," Mac Donald writes. Yet nothing that has come to light "suggests that the shooting was anything but a tragic mistake." The use of deadly force by the New York police was far less common in 1998 (403,659 arrests, 19 killed) than it was in 1993 (266,313 arrests, 23 killed).

Since shooting peaceful, unarmed citizens was obviously not typical police behavior, Mac Donald says, "the Times zeroed in on a different angle. The Street Crime Unit, and the NYPD generally, it claimed, were using the stop-and-frisk technique to harass minorities. The logic seemed to be that the same racist mentality that leads to unwarranted stopand-frisks led the four officers to shoot Diallo."

The newspaper seemed to regard any mistaken police frisks of people thought to be carrying concealed handguns as too many, she says. The Street Crime Unit reported making 45,000 frisks during 1997–98 and 9,500 arrests, of which 2,500 were for illegal guns. That ratio of one gun for every 18 frisks is "well within tolerance," Columbia University law professor Richard Uviller told Mac Donald. "I don’t know of any other way to fight the war on handguns—the numberone crime problem in the U.S. today."

The Times coverage gave little sense of the danger posed by illegal guns, Mac Donald contends, or of the dramatic reduction in homicides in New York in recent years (from a peak of 2,200 in 1990 to 633 in 1998). Nor did the newspaper pay much attention to community leaders such as one who told her: "If the Street Crime Unit pats me down because I match a description, and the next guy they pat down has a gun, God bless them." According to a recent U.S. Justice Department study, 77 percent of black New Yorkers approve of the police. But thanks in part to the "anti-police" press coverage, the other 23 percent have grown angrier, Mac Donald says, and so Street Crime Unit officers "have pulled back," making fewer arrests. No surprise then, perhaps, that in the months after the Diallo killing, murders in the city were up 10 percent.