I could have been Sean Bell. As a 23-year-old Black man living on the outskirts of New York City, I'm the same age and race as Bell, and I've likely walked some of the same streets he walked in his 23 years. The only thing that separates us is circumstance.
Who's to say I won't be next? For the first time, I distrust the legal system.
Like hundreds of people standing outside of the Jamaica, Queens, courthouse and the thousands more sitting in their offices or at home awaiting the verdict in the Sean Bell case, I hoped that justice would be served. I was wrong.
Today, Justice Arthur Cooperman rendered a not-guilty verdict in the case of Bell, the 23-year-old soon-to-be newlywed who was struck down after being sprayed with 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens. He was just hours away from being married.
"The testimony of those witnesses just didn't make sense," Judge Cooperman told a packed courtroom that included Bell's fiancée, Nicole Paultre. In doing so, Cooperman discounted many of the prosecution's witnesses, including Bell's friends and two other men severely wounded in the shooting. The verdict comes 17 months to the day of the shooting.
Detectives Gescard F. Isnora, who is Black, and Michael Oliver, who is white, together faced more than 50 years of prison time on first- and second-degree-manslaughter charges, while Detective Marc Cooper, who is also Black, faced two counts of reckless endangerment. On the surface, Cooperman's verdict of not guilty looks like another case of "it's the system, what can you do about it," but after further inspection, it makes palpable the gravity of the prison pandemic facing Black men in America.
All too often, we hear numbers that show more than one in every 15 Black men in the United States is incarcerated. We are inundated with images of Black men as the perpetrator, Black men in handcuffs.
But rarely are we reminded of the stories of Black men who have been victims of law enforcement. Rarely are we reminded of the stories of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who in 1997 was brutally assaulted and suffered rectal wounds after an officer tortured him in the bathroom of the 70th Precinct station house with a broomstick; or the story of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who, in 1999, died after police officers opened fire, spraying him with 41 bullets in the vestibule of his apartment building. Or even more recently, the case of Ousmane Zongo, an African art restorer who in 2003 was shot and killed by police officers during a warehouse raid, which police believed was the base of a counterfeit-CD operation. In each of these cases, some police officers directly involved received probation or had their charges overturned; their defense, simply, was that each felt his life was in danger.
For Judge Cooperman, apparently that was good enough.
Today, Sean Bell's name is added to that growing laundry list of Black men struck down in a hail of police gunfire. Tomorrow it may be mine.
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