Mayor: Shooting Was ‘Excessive’

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The New York Sun

Mayor Bloomberg’s response to Saturday’s police shooting is dividing black leaders, with some demanding immediate action and others urging patience while an investigation takes place.

Mr. Bloomberg yesterday said it seemed as if “excessive force” had been used in the killing of an apparently unarmed man, Sean Bell, who was leaving a strip club in Queens at 4 a.m. on the day he was to have been wed. The mayor met yesterday for two hours with more than 30 clergy and elected officials in an effort to quell anger over the shooting, in which police fired 50 bullets at a car driven by Bell.

After leaving the meeting, participants staked out varying positions. On one end was the radical City Council member Charles Barron, whose call for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to resign faced derision from others who attended the meeting. On the other end stood the city’s comptroller, William Thompson Jr., and the incoming state Senate minority leader, Malcolm Smith, who each praised the mayor’s initial steps and pledged to wait for the results of an investigation by the Queens district attorney, Richard Brown, before calling for specific changes in police policy or leadership.

At a news conference after the meeting, Mr. Bloomberg deferred to Mr. Brown’s investigation while also offering his own impressions. “It is, to me, unacceptable or inexplicable how you can have 50-odd shots fired, but that is up to the investigation to find out how that actually happened,” the mayor said as he stood surrounded by many attendees of the meeting, including Rep. Charles Rangel; the City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, and several clergy members.

“I am, to put it mildly, deeply disturbed,” Mr. Bloomberg later added. The mayor will travel to southeast Queens to meet with community leaders this morning.

In immediately reaching out to black leaders and the community, Mr. Bloomberg has struck a markedly different tone from that of his predecessor, Rudolph Giuliani, who battled often with the Rev. Al Sharpton and other black leaders. The mayor’s response going forward will be a test of what has been one of his administration’s top achievements: continuing the steady drop in crime while repairing the fractious relations that developed between predominantly black and Hispanic communities and City Hall. Those tensions peaked with constant protests at police headquarters following the death in 1999 of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant who was shot 41 times by officers in the Bronx.

Rev. Sharpton, a longtime foe of Mr. Giuliani and a chief critic of police policies, said yesterday that Mr. Bloomberg’s politeness was hardly enough. “This mayor has better manners than his predecessor. Let’s see if we have better policies,” Rev. Sharpton said outside City Hall after attending the meeting with Mr. Bloomberg. “We prefer talking than not talking, but the object is not a conversation. The object is fairness and justice.”

Rev. Sharpton later met with the Queens district attorney, Mr. Brown, and said he was convinced that the police officers who killed Bell and wounded two others had acted “beyond the law.” Citing a pattern of “disrespect, disregard, and absolute unfairness in our community,” Rev. Sharpton said he told Mr. Bloomberg: “Imagine, Mr. Mayor, living in a city where you have to live with the fear of the cops and the robbers. Some in the city worry about the robbers. We have to worry about both.”

Rev. Sharpton did not, however, echo Mr. Barron’s call for Mr. Kelly to resign. Neither did most of the participants at yesterday’s meeting. Mr. Thompson, a likely candidate for mayor in 2009, said: “I don’t think many people joined in that. I certainly don’t.”

Mr. Barron said he asked the mayor directly for a “regime change” at the meeting. “Everybody thought that was silly,” the public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, said afterward.

At his news conference in City Hall, Mr. Bloomberg backed Mr. Kelly in the strongest possible terms. “I have complete confidence in our police commissioner,” the mayor said. “He will be the police commissioner for the rest of my term. I think he is the best police commissioner the city has ever had.”

While expressing anger at Bell’s death and the lingering animosity between police and minority communities, black leaders who attended yesterday’s summit also stressed caution. Council Member James Sanders had joined in chants of “Kelly must go” at a vigil in Queens on Sunday, but after meeting with Mr. Kelly and the mayor, he apparently backed off that stance. “I think it’s too early to call for his resignation,” Mr. Sanders said.

Mr. Thompson issued a statement saying he was “stunned and outraged at what appears to be a horrific and unjustified use of force by the police,” but earlier in the day he praised the Bloomberg administration. “What could have been done by this administration has been done right now,” he said outside City Hall.


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