Quote:
Originally Posted by cheapseats
For real? You think that if black officers had unleashed a hail of bullets on a white man on the day of his wedding, those black officers would most likely also have been acquitted?
I stridently disagree.
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This is a tragic case, that I've been following since it began.
And, several of the officers were "non white".
There are some unfortunate circumstances, which led to this horrid affair.
For one, the strip club was under surveillance for drug, and prostitution suspicions.
The Many Truths Found After the Racially Charged Police Shooting of Sean Bell -- New York Magazine
Club Kalua had opened three years earlier, just another cut-rate market for vice, on a quiet side street around the corner from the Jamaica Long Island Rail Road station. Pimps and hookers cruise the front door, lit by the fluorescent glow from the JFK AirTrain terminal down the block. Inside, the girls don’t offer lap dances so much as just plop onto your lap and demand drinks. Hookers pay the bouncers for the right to waitress and meet johns there; some of the girls are said to be as young as 13. The tricks take place in cars, or in a cheap hotel a block away, or right there on 94th Avenue. Getting customers drunk seems to be club policy. White laser-printed notices are taped to the walls: MUST HAVE DRINK ALL THE TIME. Drunk johns mean more tips for the bartenders (whom the hookers are also paying off) and less of a chance that the johns turn out to be undercover cops.
The cops knew all about Club Kalua. The vice squad had racked up enough arrests to close it back in 2005, though it reopened just two months later.
But this was 2006, the year of the girl killings: Imette St. Guillen, raped and murdered after partying at a bar in Soho, and Jennifer Moore, raped and murdered hours after partying in a nightclub in Chelsea. The police had formed a new Club Enforcement Initiative, transferring detectives from vice and narcotics to crack down on nightspots. New teams of cops had worked undercover in Chelsea for a few months. By the fall of 2006, they were branching out to the outer boroughs.
Club Kalua was an obvious target. In the year since reopening, it had been the subject of more than two dozen 911 calls, an average of one every two weeks, and four arrests, including a weapons charge. On November 25, 2006, the police needed just another collar or two—a drug buy, a hooker landing a john, someone flashing a gun—to shut the place down again.
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Now, one of the undercover officers claimed to have heard one in Bell's crowd say..."go get my gun", after a disagreement with another patron.
We'll never know if this is the truth, but the real problem arose out of Bell's fear of an undercover cop, who apparently didn't make it clear enough that he was indeed a cop.
Bell, fearing trouble, evidently drove his car toward this cop, and that's when all hell broke loose.
This is such a sad story, but I don't think it should get neatly lumped in with the plethora of injustices that have taken place in NYC over the years.