No one should have to die as Diallo did. To affirm this, many New Yorkers got themselves arrested at police headquarters, ceremonially but no doubt sincerely. Had he been white in a mostly white neighborhood, argues New York University law professor Jerry Skolnik, cops wouldn't have cornered him in a vestibule and shot him. The Bronx district attorney accused the cops of harboring racial preconceptions that, beneath the formal courtesies of everyday etiquette and the law, deny blacks a chance to change misperceptions of them. And in this case Diallo paid for that misperception with his life.
But that argument itself harbors a preconception of what was in these cops' heads. Diallo's death may have reflected not the "racism" that looms so large in the liberal imagination but the stark correlation of violent crime with nonwhite skin -- in statistics and in cops' hard-won experience. The Diallo cops' Street Crime Unit doesn't operate in middle-class neighborhoods, black or white, as much as it does in poor black ones. But racism doesn't explain that discrepancy; the demographics of violent crime do. A disproportionately high number of police killings of blacks are by black cops. Washington, D.C.'s heavily black police force uses deadly force far more often than New York's does.