• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 582 0

have shot him. I sure perceived the threat of that gun. I could see it clearly, that it was chrome and that it had pearl grips on it. But I knew that I had the drop on him, and I wanted to give him just a little more benefit of a doubt because he was so young looking. I think the fact that I was an experienced officer had a lot to do with my decision. I could see a lot of fear in his face, which I also perceived in other situations, and that led me to believe that if I would just give him just a little bit more time that he might give me an option to not shoot him. The bottom line was that I was looking at him, looking at what was coming out of his pants leg, identifying it as a gun, seeing where that muzzle was gonna go when it came up. If his hand would’ve come out a little higher from his waistband, if the gun had just cleared his stomach area a little bit more, to where I would have seen that muzzle walk my way, it would’ve been over with. But the barrel never came up, and something in my mind just told me I didn’t have to shoot yet.

How long was this encounter? Two seconds? One and a half seconds? But look at how the officer’s experience and skill allowed him to stretch out that fraction of time, to slow the situation down, to keep gathering information until the last possible moment. He watches the gun come out. He sees the pearly grip. He tracks the direction of the muzzle. He waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it — and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kid’s face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. Is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? This is the gift of training and expertise — the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience. To a novice, that incident would have gone by in a blur. But it wasn’t a blur at all. Every moment — every blink — is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.

8. Tragedy on Wheeler Avenue

So there they were: Sean Carroll, Ed McMellon, Richard Murphy, and Ken Boss. It was late. They were in the South Bronx. They saw a young black man, and he seemed to be behaving oddly. They were driving past, so they couldn’t see him well, but right away they began to construct a system to explain his behavior. He’s not a big man, for instance. He’s quite small. “What does small mean? It means he’s got a gun,” says de Becker, imagining what flashed through their minds. “He’s out there alone. At twelve-thirty in the morning. In this lousy neighborhood. Alone. A black guy. He’s got a gun; otherwise he wouldn’t there. And he’s little, to boot. Where’s he getting the balls to stand out there in the middle of the night? He’s got a gun. That’s the story you tell yourself.” They back the car up. Carroll said later he was “amazed” that Diallo was still standing there. Don’t bad guys run at the sight of a car full of police officers? Carroll and McMellon get out of the car. McMellon calls out, “Police. Can we have a word?” Diallo pauses. He is terrified, of course, and his terror is written all over his face. Two towering white men, utterly out of place in that neighborhood and at that time of night, have confronted him. But the mind-reading moment is lost because Diallo turns and runs backs into the building. Now it’s a pursuit, and Carroll and McMellon are not experienced officers like the officer who watched the pearl-handled revolver rise toward him. They are raw. They are new to the Bronx and new to the Street Crime Unit and new to the unimaginable stresses of chasing what they think is an armed man down a darkened hallway. Their heart rates soar. Their attention narrows. Wheeler Avenue is an old part of the Bronx. The sidewalk is flush with the curb, and Diallo’s apartment building is flush with the sidewalk, separated by just a four-step stoop. There is no white space here. When they step out of the squad car and