Yet Another Police Incident

They are calling it "the 50-bullet shoot-out." In New York City, Sean Bell, age 23, was holding his bachelor party at a strip club. He was to be married the next day. Bell left the club and went to his car. An undercover officer at the scene believed that Bell was going to retrieve a gun and return to the club. The officer ordered Bell to stop, police said, but Bell instead tried to run him down. The officer fired, and then other officers began shooting, killing Bell and wounding his two companions.

The details are sketchy at best, and we'll have to wait for completion of an investigation before we know the whole story.

As usual, though, the critics of the Police Department are screaming about the racist cops and their excessive use of force. These critics, of course, don't need to wait for an investigation. They already know the REAL facts.

It's very possible that the firing of 50 shots was absurdly excessive. But perhaps the officers felt that some of the 'friendly fire' was directed at them. We need to consider, too, that a mere 5 gunshots might possibly have been just as lethal. The issue is not how many shots were fired, but rather whether any shots should have been fired.

The critics cry, "racism," even though some of the officers involved were blacks and hispanics. We are now being fed the ridiculous lie that the police have "institutional racism;" that policemen are all trained to be anti-black.

Even Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided already. He says that he met with Bell's family, and determined that the boys were unarmed, and that they had done nothing wrong. Of course his family believe that. But I think we still deserve to learn the unvarnished facts of the situation. If Bell did, as the police say, refuse to stop and instead try to run an officer down, then he did indeed do something wrong--something that triggered the shooting. If, on the other hand, when he was told to stop, Bell had calmly said, "yes sir," and exited his car, the entire incident probably would have not occured.

The problem is, neither Bell's parents nor we know exactly what happened. That is why there should be an impartial investigation.

In the absence of facts on this specific incident, simple statistics should help us to assess the most likely circumstance. Just do the math: If, say, 5 police officers out of 100 are either racist, or excessively brutal, or both, there is a 5% chance that a courteous and obediant citizen may suffer some harm when stopped. On the other hand, there is probably a 99% chance that a citizen who refuses to obey and attacks an officer is going to get hurt or killed. Given the choice of how to behave, I will take the 5% alternative every time. And it is very likely that the unfortunate Sean Bell unwisely trod the 99% path.

Why, then, do we continually criticize our police and cripple them with absurdly restrictive rules of operation? Why do we refuse to accept the consequences of our own actions? Why do we refuse to teach ourselves and our children to behave properly when approached by the law? Those who are so eager to deny any ownership of the problem and who rush to blame it all on "racists" are the real racists and the real villains.