The four officers were found to be defending themselves when they fired 41 shots at the West African immigrant, striking him 19 times, two police sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press.
The four officers — Kenneth Boss, Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy — encountered Diallo in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building on Feb. 4, 1999, while searching for a rape suspect. They opened fire when they saw what they thought was a gun; it turned out to be his wallet. All four were acquitted of criminal charges last year. New York Times, Thursday, April 26, 2001
Sometimes a story hardly needs comment. The seeds of it’s own outrageous absurdity are already planted, in all their imminent glory, in the very words that tell the tale. In this case– “41 shots”. The only thing left to comment on is the bizarre distortion applied to an issue like the Diallo case because the bar of absurdity has been raised so high. Those who defend the police argue that because Diallo was reaching for his wallet– which some reasonable people might regard as a rather foolish thing to do with a number of New York’s finest closing in aggressively– the police are justified in applying lethal force. The argument appears to be that the police, given their dangerous occupation, can’t afford to wait to see if it really is a wallet. Thus if they win the point that the officers thought it might have been a gun, which is the only point they have a chance of winning, they would seem to prevail and the officers would get off scot free.
But the real issue is the 41 shots. There were four officers. If they had each fired once or twice, you could argue that they were jittery and too quick and maybe even incompetent. If that had been the case, they should simply have been fired. In a dream world, good heavens, they might even have been charged with criminal negligence. But the fact that each officer fired and fired and continued to fire can only be explained by one thing, and that is that they wanted to make sure that nobody was going to survive to go to court and testify that four big, mighty, manly New York police officers went ballistic and fired their guns at him for no good reason at all.
In reality, even if Diallo had been reaching for a gun, the officers, by any reasonable standard, should still have been charged with murder, because there were four of them, and because they obviously had no intention of arresting or disabling or wounding Diallo: they fully intended to kill him.
As it turns out, they may have correctly surmised that a dead Diallo would be easier to deal with than a living witness to their actions, since Diallo, of course, is not available to deny that he even reached for his wallet.