Sample Essay
Document-Based Question – Amadou Diallo
This essay will argue that the 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallo was a tragic case of mistaken identity and not a criminal act committed by the officers involved . The shooting then quickly evolved into a controversial political issue surrounding race , and the notoriety of this national controversy exacerbated an ongoing (and still existing) problem for the New York City Police Department – a force long on the defensive about its treatment of minorities .
Documents 5, 8 and 9 lend support to the notion that the four NYPD officers simply erred – rather than acted with malicious intent . The strongest, most direct evidence here comes from author Gladwell’s account of the incident (Doc. 8), an excerpt from his bestselling book Blink , which was published six years after the shooting.
Gladwell, reconstructing the incident with the precision that time and hindsight might allow, describes how the officers misperceived the events they were witnessing and participating in – events that came at them in a rush of mere seconds. They apparently feared for their lives, and one –discovering that he and his partners had mistakenly taken a man’s life – immediately shows remorse by crying next to Diallo’s body. This account by Gladwell has the ring of truth, and we can infer that his version of the events is more likely than not to be credible because he is writing some years after the events and so can take the time to painstakingly put together an objective account. But absent any other information about Gladwell and the accuracy of his writing (What’s his background, and what might his agenda be?), one could only tentatively accept his version of events. Some corroborating evidence does support Gladwell, however: The historical background notes that a presumably impartial jury heard evidence about the case and decided that the police officers were not guilty of second-degree murder. Also lending support to this idea of police officers making a tragic mistake under highly stressful situations is the testimony of Thomas Sowell (Doc. 5), an apparently well-respected scholar who personally experienced a near-tragic scenario similar to the Diallo case. Sowell, writing more than a year after the shooting, believes the police officers to have been blameless. Sowell’s words must be taken in a general context, of course, because he has no first-hand knowledge of the Diallo case specifically. And finally, the academic journal article (Doc.
9) gives credence to the view that the NYPD officers reacted in much the same manner as many others when placed under similar (although artificial) conditions – that is to say, predisposed toward the error of shooting when faced with a potentially dangerous but in fact unarmed black man. The study findings can be seen as completely objective because they appear in an academic journal that uses other scholars to review each article prior to publication.
Documents 3, 4, 6 and 7 support the argument that the Diallo case generated a political firestorm . Within a week of the shooting, Herbert (Doc. 3) rails against the
NYPD, calling the Diallo incident a “cold-blooded killing” and alleging that many officers on the force are violently racist – a menace to the city. Herbert, writing on the editorial pages of the influential and nationally read New York Times , further injects politics into the issue by calling out New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, suggesting his response to the shooting is at least racially insensitive if not outright racist in fact. Herbert

is in the newspaper business, and so his take on the Diallo case may be skewed by a general tendency to inflate events with commentary that adds controversy – and thereby
“adds legs” to an event in the news, thus ensuring he’ll have plenty to write about for days, weeks or even months to come. Giuliani (Doc. 4), for his part, responds like any politician would: defensively, and with the attitude that his critics are attempting to exploit the Diallo case for their own partisan ends. That he oversees the NYPD as mayor no doubt colors his defense of the department, because an out-of-control police force – if that’s actually the case – implies lack of oversight on his part. More than a year after
Giuliani’s defensive press conference, the political firestorm of the Diallo shooting is reignited by the song “American Skin (41Shots)” (Doc. 6). Springsteen’s social commentary in the song strongly implies that the NYPD officers’ actions in the Diallo case are typical not just in New York City but all over the United States – and that those actions are racist at core. Police officers, Springsteen implies, will shoot someone for having the wrong skin color. When the performer comes to New York City for a concert shortly after debuting “American Skin” to an audience in the South, the president of a police organization calls for a boycott to protest Springsteen’s concerts (Doc. 7). The president, Lynch, claims Springsteen is “politicizing his music” to attract more fans. But when Lynch asserts that Diallo’s skin color did not factor in to his death, he’s speaking in defense of the people who make up his organization. Even if he personally believed the individual officers in the Diallo case were rogue cops, Lynch likely wouldn’t say so publicly. His lack of candor would be expected of a police benevolent association president.
Documents 1, 2 and 10 reveal that the Diallo case was only one notorious incident in the ongoing saga of the NYPD being on the defensive over allegations of improper conduct . The first two of these documents, however – along with the fact of the Diallo defendants’ acquittal – do not lend weight to the veracity of those allegations.
Fyfe (Doc. 1) is being interviewed by a reporter in response to a spate of police shootings nearly two decades ago – long before the Diallo incident. But here he defends the NYPD over allegations of being “trigger happy” (based on race?), saying the force is
“restrained” in its use of force. That Fyfe is a professor of criminology at a university in another big city suggests that he is both an expert and objective in his assessment. He has no ax to grind. The firearms discharge report (Doc. 2), meanwhile, contains data that put the Diallo case into context, revealing that police shootings were trending downward when Diallo was killed. Further, the number of incidents in which officers shot at “perps” who did not return fire – a category into which Diallo would have fit – fell in 1999 by nearly 50% from the previous year. There was fewer than one incident per week on average that year and in subsequent years – in a city of 8 million people. These statistics suggest professional restraint on the behalf of NYPD officers. One could argue, however, that since the Diallo case happened in February of 1999, the statistics began trending down thereafter – something that could be used to support the idea the force was more
“trigger happy” before the incident.At any rate, the department continues to receive criticism. The website of the New York Civil Liberties Union (Doc. 10) in May 2008 questioned the department’s shooting practices, pointing out that nearly 9 out of 10 people shot at by officers were black or Latino. The data comes from a new analysis of the NYPD’s own statistics from 1996-97, the last years in which the department reported

the race of civilian targets. The department no doubt stopped keeping track of the race of civilian targets because of ongoing criticism that shootings were racially motivated – and the recordkeeping change does not put the NYPD in a positive light in regards to its community outreach efforts. Still, the numbers in and of themselves do not explain the motivations of the officers involved. The numbers could, as Fyfe noted nearly two decades ago, merely reflect “what’s happening in the city” (i.e., police officers encountering more criminal conduct by blacks and Latinos).
Missing from the documentary evidence are facts that could shed more direct light on the Diallo shooting itself. The existence of a videotape (taken from a security camera on the scene or from a nearby business) showing the sequence of events could either bolster or refute Gladwell’s account of the shooting. Nothing could replace seeing it firsthand. Such documentary evidence is unlikely, and so the next best thing might be copies of the trial transcript, showing the evidence used by both sides. Presumably the defense team used police reports to exonerate the officers while prosecutors used that same evidence or other facts gathered by their investigators to charge the officers with the crime of second-degree murder. That criminal charges were brought in the first place suggests there’s enough evidence to at least question the central thesis of this essay – that the shooting was a tragic accident. But the prosecution may have been influenced by the highly charged political atmosphere generated by the Diallo case. The extensive trial transcript would provide the most extensive documentary evidence to analyze. Also potentially helpful would be the research and/or interview notes Gladwell used to write his account of the incident. Did he rely only on the police officers’ testimony? Did he interview bystanders who may have witnessed it? Answers to such questions would help one to better evaluate his thoroughness and objectivity.