To the Editors.

Bad tactics Re: your May 21 editorial, "Racial Politics," on the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York City.

Policemen firing forty-one bullets into a man from a distance of ten to fifteen feet is not merely a terrible tragedy, it is an example of disastrous police training and behavior that result when the police consider themselves an army of occupation trying to control a lawless mob.

Your citing the dramatically reduced crime statistics in New York City under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is specious. Crime is down throughout the United States (a booming economy will do that) and other major police forces have accomplished that without resorting to cowboy shootouts or brutalizing their minority citizens.

You cite Bob Herbert, the New York Times op-ed columnist (and an African- American) who said the shooting of Mr. Diallo was not murder. Presumably you take that from his April 4, 1999 column. But that column, commenting on aggressive policing in New York City, also said: "Innocent New Yorkers were stopped and frisked by the tens of thousands. Thousands more were dragged off to jail for the most minor offenses...traffic violations, drinking in public, riding a bicycle on the sidewalk."

Those weren't middle-class white New Yorkers being hassled by the police. Whites in New York aren't treated like that. Can you imagine what furor would have erupted if four African-American policemen emptied their weapons into a Hasidic man? It is the minorities who suffer police harassment and death. That has been the pattern in New York City for generations.

I have heard the justifications before: Minorities commit more crime than whites; minority communities want aggressive policing (a close friend, a New York City councilman and an African-American, would jail petty criminals for life if he thought he could get away with it!); we can't let barbarians get the upper hand, and accidents will happen.

It should be clear to even the most casual observer that the New York City police department is a force with many racists who may not hate minorities, they just think them subhuman. With that mindset, deaths and intentional brutalizations will always occur. Joseph D. Policano East Hampton, N.Y.

Mercy or Justice? Your May 21 editorial, "Racial Politics," touches on another hot-button issue. All of the distrust and resentment that float around loose just grabs at incidents like the Diallo shooting. The pull is so strong to name the problem people. Depending on the way one approaches these issues, some of the candidates might be: Brutal and racist police officers; opportunistic self-proclaimed leaders like Sharpton; political leaders, police department officials; criminals, drug dealers; anybody you like.

Your editorial is nuanced and looks at the situation from a number of angles. I don't find that you play to any of the easy negative pulls listed above. I enumerate them because I feel some of them myself.

Something that tugs on me is this three-part script that seems to happen over and over: Police officers kill someone in questionable circumstances; the officers account for their action by saying "I thought he was going for a gun"; that is the end of the matter.

This feels to me like impunity: Law enforcement gets to kill anybody, then say "I thought he was going for a gun." The fact that I know real situations are always more ambiguous than this doesn't get me out of the trap. Nor does knowing that law enforcement is a dangerous and maybe thankless profession. I can tell myself this, but the pull is to blame the cops and blame people like your editorial staff for wrapping up the matter by saying, "In other words, the Diallo killing does not appear to be the result of any systematic police brutality or racism." But perhaps it was unsystematic brutality and racism, and maybe the game is rigged so that police officers can count on getting away with murder, whether or not they are brutal or racist.

So what do I want, mercy or justice? Well, it is mercy that I need, and mercy is our hope and the promise that has been made to us as Christians, I believe. I look forward to a twenty-four-hour prayer vigil for racial reconciliation that we at the Minnehaha United Church of Christ in Minneapolis will be undertaking as part of a year-long vigil organized by the Minnesota Council of Churches. Bob Malles Saint Paul, Minn.

Categorical imperatives Bruce Russett's "Is NATO's War Just?" [May 21] is commendable, but it does not go far enough in assessing the Kosovo conflict through the just- war criteria. In particular, it does not interpret the jus in bello principle of discrimination in a stringent enough manner, and it evades the jus ad bellum precept of right intention, which to my mind is the nub of the matter.

Assume what I think is obvious: that there is a just cause for NATO's going to war in Kosovo, in light of Slobodan Milosevic's genocidal aims and actions. Given that, what does the in bello principle of discrimination demand? Certainly it demands that noncombatants not be intentionally targeted, but it demands more: that the tactics employed fit this just intention. But this is precisely not the case. By bombing legitimate targets of military importance at a "safe distance"-meaning one that reduces to near zero the possibility of incurring NATO casualties-NATO has made massive "collateral damage" virtually certain. Such bombing is indiscriminate in practice, if not in intention. To persist in such tactics not only punishes primarily those with whom NATO has no legitimate gripe-the Serbian citizenry, rather than the Milosevic regime-but it actually works against the aim of forcing Milosevic to comply with international law and withdraw from Kosovo. The bombing has given Milosevic cover for accelerating the ethnic cleansing, ample rhetorical resources for his radical nationalist platform, and has crippled any effective resistance to Milosevic from within Serbia. Thus the bombing is not only indiscriminate, it is disproportionate as well.

This raises another question: given the lack of fit between aims and tactics, one may ask "what is the ultimate goal of the war?" As a means of forcing Milosevic's compliance, the bombing was not only a failure, but a predictable one. If rectifying the injustice in Kosovo was indeed the goal, then a massive invasion of ground troops, with the ultimate strategy of driving the Serbs from Kosovo and perhaps defeating the Milosevic regime (with all that implies: protracted occupation of Kosovo, setting up a Serbian protectorate, and so on), was clearly necessary. Either that, or intervention should have been forgone altogether. Why adopt a strategy doomed to fail? Perhaps because justice in Kosovo was never the goal to begin with. When one assumes that the NATO bombing was a matter of "preserving credibility" rather than stopping genocide, the strategy makes perfect sense: by flexing its military muscle, NATO visibly remains a power to be reckoned with. It might then be able to live with its failure to intervene at an earlier time, when there was a more "reasonable hope of success" at a much more acceptable cost and level of risk. But this makes the intentions of NATO unacceptable to the moral tradition of the just war. "Saving face" is not a policy aim that justifies killing on a grand scale. Michael J. Quirk Bellerose, N.Y.