[Tom, some answers, from the Village Voice.]
The Diallo Index
By Ward Harkavy
Number of days before he was shot that sock peddler Amadou Diallo told his mother that he planned to buy Nike shoes and send them to his brothers in Guinea: 5
Total U.S. sales in dollars of Nike shoes for the third quarter of fiscal 1999: 828.5 million
Billions of dollars of socks sold in the U.S. during 1998: 4.7
Dollars collected by Diallo for sales of socks and other items on a good night: 150
Maximum number of times a day Diallo could have said prayers—on a rug he kept in a small back room of a convenience market on 14th Street—before returning home to the Bronx: 5
Number of square feet in the small vestibule of the Bronx building where he was shot: 40
Number of bullets fired at Diallo from four semiautomatic pistols—two Sig-Sauers, one Smith & Wesson, and one Glock: 41
Number of bullets that hit Diallo: 19
Minimum number of feet a Glock bullet travels in one second (unless it strikes an object or a person): 1148
Glock semiautomatic pistols manufactured before 1983: 0
Glock semiautomatic pistols sold in the United States between 1983 and 1996: 1.2 million
Number of Glocks sold per month in 1995: 20,000
Share of U.S. law-enforcement market Glock had in 1984: 0
Percentage of U.S. law-enforcement market Glock had in 1997: 60-65
Accidental discharges of Glocks by District of Columbia police during the decade beginning in 1988: 120+
D.C. police who accidentally shot themselves or others in the same period: 19
Number of years starting in 1988 that firearms experts warned D.C. police officials about the Glock's "light trigger" and its propensity to fire an unintentional shot when handled incorrectly: 10
Year that the FBI gave Glock low marks for safety and cited a "high potential for unintentional shots": 1988
Year NYPD modified Glock triggers to require a more forceful finger tug to fire them: 1990
Number of months pregnant an Asbury Park, New Jersey, cop's girlfriend was when he accidentally shot her in January 1997 while unloading his Glock 9mm handgun in their bedroom: 7
Age of Diallo when he was killed: 22
Life expectancy at birth for males in Diallo's homeland of Guinea: 44.02
Millions of dollars in total expenditures by the government of Guinea in 1995: 652
Millions of dollars in total expenditures by the New York Police Department in 1998: 2399
Dollars a D.C. detective was ordered to pay a fellow detective for accidentally shooting him in the stomach with a Glock inside police headquarters: 880,000
Number of dollars D.C. taxpayers spent on 4300 Glock semiautomatic pistols: 1,000,000
Estimated number of Glock semiautomatic handguns issued to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation law-enforcement officers and later sold at a profit by individual officers to outsiders: 700
Number of times Diallo was shot in the legs (in addition to wounds in the back, right arm, chest, aorta, spinal cord, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, and intestines) by full-metal-jacket slugs, which the NYPD later decided to replace with more damaging hollow-point bullets: 11
Dollars of box-office gross during 1987 of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket: 46,000,000
Dollars it costs to purchase 9 million rounds of hollow-point bullets: 500,000
Year in which New York City transit and housing cops began using hollow-point bullets: 1990
Number of bystanders hit by hollow-point bullets fired by transit police in 1995-96: 6
Number of them hit by a bullet that had passed through another object: 1
Number of NYPD cops during the same period who were struck by other cops' full-metal-jacket slugs: 44
Number of them who were hit by full-metal-jacket slugs that had passed through other people: 17
Cops hit by hollow-point bullets fired by fellow officers during the same period: 4
Number of them hit by hollow-point bullets that had passed through other people: 1
Estimated percentage of 600,000 local cops in the United States who are members of the NYPD: 6.7
Estimated number of NYPD cops who were members of the Street Crime Unit in early 1999: 400
Number of people stopped and frisked by the Street Crime Unit in 1997-98: 45,000
Number of those arrested: 10,000
Number of those not arrested: 35,000
Number of NYPD Street Crime Unit cops who killed Diallo: 4
Number of South African cops currently seeking amnesty for the killing of Steve Biko in 1977: 4
Sources: 1, 4-5 People; 2 Footwear News; 3 Hosiery Assoc.; 6, 21, 28 AP; 7, 24, 30-42 New York Times; 8 Village Voice; 9 glockworks.com; 10-11 Seattle Times; 12 Advertising Age; 13-14, 20 Asbury Park Press; 15-19, 25-26 Washington Post; 22-23 CIA; 27 New York Daily News; 29 Entertainment Weekly; 43 Bronx district attorney; 44 London Daily Telegraph.
[end]
Carl
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