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policy and politics on the circumstances leading to the killing. If debatable
innocence is the picture, this other matter is the frame around it. It
interrogates innocence and guilt on a systemic level rather than an individual
one, looking beyond victims and perpetrators to a different analytic domain
and a different accountability. In this paper, I seek to tell both stories,
bringing them into relationship to each other in an effort to address police
shootings that entwine with issues of race in ways pointing to change.
Tarnishing innocence
The first instance of questioning Amadou Diallo’s innocence was a
somewhat mysterious series of press reports stating that he had filed a false
claim for political amnesty. His immigration status was expiring, and so he
concocted a story that placed his origins in a country from which he did not
come, and claimed that his parents were victims of political assassination.
He was granted amnesty, only to have the INS (the relevant agency at the
time) re-open his case and revoke the decision. A day or two after Diallo was
killed, several newspapers published stories about the matter, but the
reporting fell away within a week.
Long afterward, the Village Voice
investigated that side-mystery and found that the night of the shooting NYPD
officers had searched Diallo’s apartment and questioned his roommates.
They took away his immigration file and released the indication of illegal
action to the press. The procedure was not unique to the Diallo case, of
course; release of information about criminal activity on the part of unarmed
victims of police shootings is very common.
To report criminality is to hint
Convention