Black and Blue: New York erupts over a race-tinged killing-again.

Whenever a crime with racial overtones hits the newspapers, a highly predictable scenario is acted out. If the crime is, say, a mugging of a white person by a black person, the news media take immediate pains to establish that the crime had nothing to do with race. It was simply an isolated act of thuggishness. The law must take its course-but no more need be said about the matter. If, on the other hand, a black man is attacked by a white person or gang of whites, then it becomes the occasion for wider social theorizing about the persistence of racial attitudes in American society. Perhaps it was an attempted lynching; very likely, it was a hate crime; almost certainly it indicates racism in the community. And if the crime is one of police brutality against someone belonging to an ethnic minority, then it is held to demonstrate widespread ill-treatment of minorities by the police, the entrenched racism of social institutions in general, and the need for their reform along "affirmative action" lines.

If this account seems exaggerated, consider the media's treatment of two New York crimes that occurred within four months of each other in 1989: the murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a black youth, by a white member of a street gang in Bensonhurst and the rape and near-fatal beating of a white investment banker by a gang of black and Hispanic youths in Central Park. "Black Youth Is Killed in Brooklyn by Whites in Attack Called Racial," is how the New York Times headlined the Yusuf Hawkins murder. Only a few months before it had given the Central Park rape a more racially dispassionate introduction: "Youths Rape and Beat Central Park Jogger."

No one suggested that the people of Schomburg Plaza, where the jogger's attackers lived, bore any responsibility for the assault on her. Indeed, the New York Daily News solemnly warned against any such lapse into racial stereotyping: "the simple truth [is] that dreadful things are done by individual thugs to individual victims-not by or to a race." But the Hawkins murder produced exactly the opposite reflection: that it was the inevitable result of the racial hostility allegedly felt by the Italian-American inhabitants of Bensonhurst towards blacks. A Daily News editorial duly intoned: "despite the protests of some Bensonhurst residents, the attack was based on race . . . wrong to dismiss it as a bunch of neighbor rowdies going too far . . . The motivation was deeper, more insidious." Connoisseurs of double standards will especially enjoy the titles of the two News editorials. They were, respectively, "Stay Calm, New York" and "Dare To Attack Racist Violence."

This discrepancy in journalistic treatment might be understandable if most crimes in which the victims and perpetrators are of different races were committed by whites against blacks, or other minorities. But, as statistics amply demonstrate, this is not the case. In light of the sad reality, it is not racism but prudence that prompts a white person to cross the street at the approach of black youths. Merely consider the trade-off. If the white's fears are misplaced and the youths are decent, respectable persons, they will at worst suffer feelings of rejection and humiliation at being mistaken for criminals. If his fears are correct, however, then he has saved himself from something terrible. These considerations weigh very differently in the scales of justice: It is perfectly reasonable to risk hurting others' feelings in order to avoid being murdered. And when that trade-off is multiplied thousands of times, it is more than reasonable for a city police force to risk hurting the feelings of those who fit a criminal "profile" by frisking them for guns in order to save hundreds of people from being murdered.

SPLIT-SECOND DECISION

Which brings us to the case of Amadou Diallo in New York. On February 4, four New York cops searching for a serial rapist in the Bronx followed Diallo into the foyer of his tenement building and shot him 19 times, firing 41 bullets in a matter of five seconds. Diallo was unarmed, and the cops have since been charged with second-degree murder. The most common explanation, drawn from a lawyer for the four and other policemen, is that Diallo fit the profile of the rapist and the cops thought he was going for a gun. In a split-second decision, they shot him to save themselves. But since the cops have not yet given their account of the incident and there were no eye-witnesses, no one else really knows what happened.

That has not prevented New York's media mavens like the Times columnist Bob Herbert, on-the-make liberal politicians like Mark Green, failed mayors like David Dinkins, racial hucksters like "the Rev." Al Sharpton, and almost-famous people like Susan Sarandon from deciding not only that the cops are guilty of a serious crime but that such an outrage is the inevitable result of the policing tactics adopted under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In a left-wing version of debutantes being presented at court, various celebrities turn up outside City Hall to be arrested, appear briefly in court, and then head off to receive congratulations on their extremely civil disobedience over Park Avenue cocktails. Media coverage since the shooting (the New York Post excepted) has generally hewed to the line "Dare To Attack Racist Policing" rather than "Stay Calm, New York." We are continually reminded, for instance, that "four white cops" killed Diallo by newspapers that generally criticize references to the race of criminal suspects; so is journalistic etiquette thrown out the window.

Unusually for such ideologically charged cases, however, there seems to be broad agreement on the facts. All agree that under Giuliani the New York Police Department has conducted a remarkably successful war against crime-though people differ about the alleged costs of that success. How did this astounding improvement take place? Not because the NYPD has been shooting more people, as the agitprop campaign over Diallo might suggest. The rate of police shootings in New York is low and declining. In the last three years, it has fallen from 344 shootings to 249. Fatal police shootings have declined still more dramatically, from 30 to 19 over the same period-the second-lowest figure since 1973, when records began to be kept. Indeed, such shootings in New York are now more rare than in other major cities. Diallo's murder was not an indication of how the NYPD operates, as the protesters allege; if anything, it runs counter to the trend of policing under Giuliani.

Crime has declined because the NYPD has waged an aggressive campaign to stop it before it happens, in particular by conducting searches for illegal handguns in high-crime areas. The Street Crimes Unit-to which the four policemen who shot Diallo belong-is one important element in this campaign. Although it constitutes only about 1 percent of the NYPD, it accounts for 40 percent of all gun arrests. It has accomplished this by conducting street frisks of those whom cops have a "reasonable suspicion" are armed and dangerous. But its critics charge that this has led to the frisking of too many people. A New York Times report, for instance, gave the numbers frisked in 1997-98 as 45,084, of whom only 9,546 were arrested for gun possession-which led the Times reporter to complain that "nearly 40,000 people were stopped and frisked . . . because a street crimes officer mistakenly thought they were carrying guns."

What that means, of course, is that about one in five of those stopped was in fact carrying an illegal gun. One wonders what percentage the Times would consider reasonable-30 percent? 50? 75?-before it blessed such searches. And since 20 percent is apparently too low, how does it justify allowing 9,546 armed criminals to wander round New York to mug, murder, and rape merely to avoid embarrassing about 17,500 people annually?

The answer is, of course, that, like mainstream media opinion in general, the Times would raise no serious objection if those frisked and arrested were an ethnic cross-section of society. What raises its hackles is that they are mainly black or Hispanic, which in turn raises its suspicions that they are the victims of police "racial profiling." This the NYPD strongly denies-taking someone's race into account when conducting a search is illegal to begin with. Its own explanation is that, if you are conducting searches mainly in high-crime areas, then you will inevitably end up frisking mainly black and Hispanic suspects. As a former commander of the Street Crimes Unit said, "In the precincts that we worked in, it would be difficult to find a white guy." But does anyone seriously suggest that the police should concentrate on low-crime areas?